The Intel ASCI Option Red system is the first one commisioned under the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative. Therefore, of the three projects the most details are known and first performance numbers are available.
The Option Red system will contain 9000 Pentium Pro processors in 4500 compute nodes with a theoretical peak performance of 1.8 Tflop/s. At this moment a measured performance of 1.068 Tflop/s has been realised out of 1.453 Tflop/s on 7264 processors ([4]) in the solving of a linear system of order 215,000. The system is of the DM-MIMD type with a network that resembles that of the Intel Paragon XP but at a higher speed: the point-to-point bandwidth has a maximum of 400 MB/s and the bisectional bandwidth of the full system should be 50 GB/s.
The system harbours two cooperating operating systems: the Paragon OS, as used in the present Paragon machines and Light Weight Kernel system that should optimise task handling at the nodes.
It is not clear whether Intel will commericalise a variant of the Option Red system or indeed will stay in the business of high-performance computing alltogether. However, the project has demonstrated the potential of the Intel approach sofar and other companies might take interest in producing similar systems if Intel would abandon supercomputing.