Eventually the ASCI Red was dethroned by a supercomputer specifically designed to replace it; the ASCI White. This new supercomputer was installed in the heart of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. At half strength, the system became operational in November 2000, and was completed in June 2001.

Unlike the ASCI Red which was built by Intel, the ASCI White was IBM's chance to shine. ASCI White derived its power from 8192 IBM Power3 processors clocked at 375 MHz. ASCI White represents a new trend among supercomputers, adopting a cluster. A cluster architecture is a collection of individual nodes connected together to work as a single system. Today, clustering is used by 85 percent of the supercomputers listed on the TOP500.

ASCI White actually includes 512 RS/6000 SP servers, each containing 16 CPUs. Each CPU was capable of 1.5 GFlops of processing power, which made ASCI White theoretically capable of reaching 12.3 TFlops. It's real-world performance was considerably lower, only reaching 7.2 TFlops under Linpack (7.3 TFlops from 2003).

ASCI White required 3,000 kW of power to operate, with an additional 3,000 kW consumed by the cooling system.

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23 Years Of Supercomputer Evolution - Tom's Hardware