IBM ASCI White

ASCI White was a supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. It was a computer cluster based on IBM's commercial RS/6000 SP computer. 512 of these machines were connected together for ASCI White, with 16 processors per node and 8,192 processors in total with 6 terabytes of memory and 160 terabytes of disk storage. Despite these formidable statistics, each processor was slow by 2006 standards, operating at a mere 375 MHz. Therefore, it was almost exclusively used for computations requiring dozens of processors. The computer weighed 106 tons and consumed 3 MW of electricity with a further 3 MW needed for cooling. It had a theoretical processing speed of 12.3 teraflops. The system ran IBM's AIX operating system.