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 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 has a theoretical peak of 40 Tera-flops.
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.
