The original goals to deliver a true teraflop machine by the end of 1996 that would be capable of running an ASCI application using all memory and nodes by September 1997 were met.

[4][6] It was the first ASCI machine that the Department of Energy acquired,[6] and also the first supercomputer to score above one teraflops on the LINPACK benchmark, a test that measures a computer's calculation speed.

Parallel applications executed in the Compute Partition which contained nodes optimized for floating point performance.

The Service Partition provided an integrated, scalable host that supported interactive users (log-in sessions), application development, and system administration.

[9] According to Intel, the ASCI Red Computer is also the first large scale supercomputer to be built entirely of common commercially available components.

[10] All of ASCI Red's partitions are interconnected to form one supercomputer, however at the same time none of the nodes support global shared memory.

Intel's TFLOPS PFS is an extremely efficient "Parallel File System" that can sustain transfer speeds of up to 1 GB/s, eliminating bottlenecks.

Upgrades later in 1999, to specially packaged Pentium II Xeon processors, pushed performance to 3.1 TFLOPS.

[11] Cougar is a Sandia Labs and University of New Mexico collaboration; it is a lightweight OS based on PUMA and SUNMOS, two systems that were also designed for use on the Paragon supercomputer.