Abstract
The Red Storm architecture, which was conceived by Sandia National Laboratories and
implemented by Cray, Inc., has become the basis for most successful line of commercial
supercomputers in history. The success of the Red Storm architecture is due largely to
the ability to effectively and efficiently solve a wide range of science and engineering
problems. The Cray XT series of machines that embody the Red Storm architecture have
allowed for unprecedented scaling and performance of parallel applications spanning
many areas of scientific computing. In this paper, we describe the fundamental
characteristics of the architecture and its implementation that have enabled this success,
even through successive generations of hardware and software.