The architecture of Red Storm, the new Opteron based supercomputer developed by Sandia National Labs have emerged on the web.

The 77 page presentation [pdf] gives the complete specs of the Red Storm Architecture, designed to be a single system with a fully connected 3D mesh interconnect.

The Red Storm uses 108 cabinets and 10,368 Opteron 2GHz processors, and around 10TB of 333MHz PC2700 DDR memory.

The monster uses Linux on service and IO nodes, LWK (Catamount) on compute nodes, and a version of stripped down Linux on the RAS nodes. The whole beastie takes less than 2MW of total power and cooling.

According to the presentation, system software performance scales "nearly perfectly" with the number of processors to the full size of the computer (page 15) and provides a scaling analysis on the following page.

There's some interesting discussion on Amdahl's Law, and we suggest if you're interested you go over here, and check it out for yourself.