Computing · 1996

ASCI Red

The first computer to exceed one teraFLOPS.

Built by Intel for Sandia National Laboratories, ASCI Red linked over 9,000 Pentium Pro processors. It showed massively parallel commodity chips could beat custom vector machines.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 2

Cray-1 1976
Microprocessor (Intel 4004) 1971

What it led to 1

Roadrunner 2008

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Fastest computer in the world Latest: 2.2×10¹⁸ operations per second (2026) Source: Wikipedia: List of fastest computers; Wikipedia: History of supercomputing

Fastest supercomputer Latest: 1.81B GFLOP/s (2025) Source: Our World in Data