ASCI Thor's Hammer
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Thor's Hammer is the first supercomputer using the Red Storm architecture. In 2004, the computer was installed at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The project is a collaboration between Cray and Sandia Labs.
It is a 3-dimensional mesh-based MIMD machine consisting of 10,368 compute nodes, 10 TB of total distributed memory and 240 TB of disk storage. The system uses AMD 64-bit Opteron CPUs as processing nodes and PowerPC 440 based communication processors called SeaStar. The system consists of 140 cabinets, taking up 3000 square feet (280 m²).
The system consists of two partitions: a compute partition and a service partition. Compute nodes run a very light-weight operating system called "Catamount", which is based on the operating system of ASCI Red called "Cougar". Service partitions run a version of Linux.
The system is meant to be a replacement for the earlier ASCI Red. The system as initially delivered had a theoretical peak of 40 TeraFLOPS, but after a CPU upgrade to dual core Opteron 2.6 GHz in 2006 it was able to achieve 101.4 TFLOPS to place it at number 3 on the June 2007 Top 500.
It was built as stage of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) started by the United States Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration to build a simulator to replace live nuclear testing following the moratorium on testing started by President George H. W. Bush in 1992 and extended by Bill Clinton in 1993.
Cray Inc. offers a commercial version of the system known as the Cray XT3.
