CHIME X-Engine

Also known as CHIME correlator GPU back end

Operated by CHIME Collaboration at Dominion Radio Astrophysical Obs. .

Researched with AI assistance, checked by scripts. These rows were researched by AI agents reading public operator, laboratory and vendor sources, appended by scripts and checked by automated validation; no subject-matter expert has reviewed them (how this site is made). A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1350 of 1581 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 64 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: -
Rpeak: -
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: -
Cores: -
Power: 220 kW
Per watt: - 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.

How it compares

Ranked against the other machines in this dataset that report the same figure: those that first came into service within two years of CHIME X-Engine, and those in Canada. Computed from our tables; a metric is ranked only when at least eight peers report it.

Metric	Value	Against its era	Against its country
Power draw	220 kW	#125 of 161 · bottom 23%	#14 of 16 · bottom 14%

Every metric is ranked largest-first, so a high power-draw rank means a big power draw, not a good one. Rmax ÷ Rpeak uses HPL-measured results only. Rankings move as machines are added; they describe this dataset, not the world.

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
Accelerator	- AMD FirePro S9300x2 dual-chip boards, two per node on 256 nodes (four GPU chips per node)	AMD AMDNASDAQ	512 reported	Reported	arxiv.org arxiv.org
CPU	- Intel Xeon E5-2620v3 6-core 2.4 GHz, one per node, 256 nodes	Intel INTCNASDAQ	256 reported	Reported	arxiv.org

The read

GPU spatial-correlation stage of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory near Penticton, British Columbia, fed by the telescope's FPGA F-engine. The CHIME hardware paper describes 256 custom nodes in two liquid-cooled enclosures (26 racks), each with one Intel Xeon E5-2620v3, 128 GiB RAM (32 TiB in total), a quad 10 GbE NIC and two dual-chip AMD FirePro S9300x2 boards, so four GPU chips per node and 1,024 overall. It correlates 2048 receiver polarisations across 400 MHz, taking in 6.6 Tb/s of channelized data, and draws about 220 kW with the GPUs clocked down to 722 MHz (design maximum 256 kW). CHIME has operated continuously since its first-light ceremony on 7 September 2017, which is used as the start date. Both sources are CHIME collaboration papers (2020 hardware paper and 2022 overview), so independence is limited.

Timeline

2017-09 First operational source

Site & facility

Dominion Radio Astrophysical Obs.

Location: Penticton, BC, Canada

arxiv.org

Change history

2026-10-18 Added CHIME X-Engine (CHIME Collaboration)