Supercomputers/Systems/Blues
USA · operational · hpc
Blues
Also known as Argonne LCRC Blues cluster
Operated by Argonne National Laboratory .
Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1263 of 1345 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 56 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.
Measured performance
- Rmax
- 81.82 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 107.83 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 75.9%
- Cores
- 5,184
- Power
- 129.6 kW
- Per watt
- 0.6 GF/W
Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.
What this machine is made of
One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.
| Role | Part | Supplier at build | Quantity | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Integrator | - Appro Xtreme-X cluster | Appro HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.orgweb.archive.org |
| CPU | Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPUs x86-64 · 8C · 2.6 GHz · 32 nm · 115 W Intel Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.6GHz, 16 cores per node | Intel | - | Reported | top500.orgweb.archive.org |
The read
Appro Xtreme-X cluster of Argonne's Laboratory Computing Resource Center (LCRC), the lab-wide computing service for Argonne researchers. TOP500 lists Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.6GHz processors on InfiniBand QDR running Linux, 5,184 cores, Rmax 81.82 TFlop/s, Rpeak 107.83 TFlop/s and 129.6 kW, and it appears only once, 439th on the November 2012 list. An LCRC page captured by the Internet Archive in 2016 describes Blues as 310 public nodes of 16 Sandy Bridge cores (4,960 public cores) on QLogic QDR InfiniBand with a theoretical peak of 107.8 TFlops, roughly twice the power of the previous Fusion cluster; the 107.8 TFlop/s peak agrees across the two independent sources.
Timeline
- 2012 First operational source
Change history
- 2026-10-09 Added Blues
Source check
We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.
| Cited source | Result | Found on the page |
|---|---|---|
| web.archive.org | names system only | - |
| top500.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon E5-2670 |
Checked 2026-10-13 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.