ASCI Red System Decommissioning

Photo by: Paul Edward Sanchez - Sandia National Laboratories

Before Justin R. Rattner was vice president and chief technology officer at Intel, we was an engineer and did pioneering work on supercomputers, including the ASCI Red System.

Located at Sandia National Laboratories, ASCI Red was the first computer to sustain one trillion operations per second (one teraFLOPS), and between 1997 and 2000 it was the world’s fastest computer according to the TOP500 project. ASCI Red was used to run simulations of nuclear explosions as of the part of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program. It was decommissioned in 2006.

In June 2010, Rattner discussed what inspired him to build ASCI Red with Big Think. During the 4-minute interview, posted on Big Think’s YouTube channel, Rattner also explained what sparked his interest in math and science.

“I built my first computer, or calculator I guess more accurately, when I was 12 and I had to learn about binary arithmetic and how computers did arithmetic. And that really took me into learning new things about math and certainly electrical engineering because it was all part of creating that calculator.”