Supercomputers/Systems/Cetus
USA · operational · hpc
Cetus
Also known as ALCF Blue Gene/Q Cetus
Operated by Argonne National Laboratory at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility .
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
- 715.55 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 838.86 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 85.3%
- Cores
- 65,536
- Power
- 328.75 kW
- Per watt
- 2.2 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 | - IBM Blue Gene/Q, 4 cabinets, 4,096 nodes | IBM | - | Reported | top500.orgweb.archive.org |
| CPU | IBM PowerPC A2 (Power BQC) CPUs PowerPC A2 · 18C · 1.6 GHz · 45 nm · 55 W IBM PowerPC A2 (Power BQC) 16C 1.6GHz, 4,096 nodes | IBM | - | Reported | top500.orgweb.archive.org |
| Interconnect | IBM BlueGene/Q 5D torus Interconnect 5D torus · 2 GB/s per link per direction Blue Gene/Q 5D torus | IBM | - | Reported | top500.orgweb.archive.org |
The read
IBM Blue Gene/Q at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, used to run small jobs and debug problems that occurred on Mira. TOP500 lists Power BQC 16C 1.6GHz processors on the Blue Gene/Q custom interconnect running Linux, 65,536 cores, Rmax 715.55 TFlop/s, Rpeak 838.86 TFlop/s and 328.75 kW; it first appeared 99th on the June 2012 list, peaked at 55th in June 2014 and was last listed 497th in June 2018. An ALCF page captured by the Internet Archive in 2017 describes Cetus as an IBM BG/Q with 4 cabinets, 4,096 nodes of 16 1600 MHz PowerPC A2 cores (65,536 cores), 16 GB per node and a 5D torus, sharing Mira's software environment and file systems; the core count agrees across the two independent sources.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
Argonne Leadership Computing Facility
- Location
- Lemont, IL, USA
- Cooling
- Direct liquid cooling (warm water)
- Commissioned
- 2006
Change history
- 2026-10-09 Added Cetus
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 and part | IBM PowerPC A2 (Power BQC) |
| top500.org | names system and part | IBM BlueGene/Q 5D torus |
Checked 2026-10-13 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.
Further reading
Operating a supercomputer
Acceptance testing, why "installed" and "in production" are six months apart, and the machine lifecycle.
Inside a node
Latency-optimised versus throughput-optimised processors, NUMA, and the end of the host-to-device copy.
The interconnect
Topologies, why latency and tail behaviour matter more than bandwidth, and how the fabric market consolidated.