Red Storm. Cray Computer contractor checks out a Red Storm panel. Red Storm has been judged to be the world's most efficient supercomputers of its time. Among the machine?s advances was its use of off-the-shelf parts, which made it cheaper to build, repair and upgrade. Red Storm was air-cooled instead of water-cooled, so parts could be replaced and upgrades completed while the machine was running. The only custom component was the Interconnect chip that made it possible to pass information more directly from processor to processor while applications were running. High-memory bandwidth kept the processors from being starved for data. And its architecture was upgradeable, from a theoretical peak at birth of 41.47 teraflops in 2005 to 124.42 teraflops in 2006 to 284.16 teraflops in 2008, because the machine accommodated single-, dual- and quad-core processors that eventually reached 12,920 in number.