Supercomputers/Systems/Hawk (AFRL)
USA · operational · hpc
Hawk (AFRL)
Also known as AFRL DSRC SGI Altix 4700 Hawk
Operated by AFRL DSRC at AFRL DSRC (Wright-Patterson AFB) .
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
- 51.44 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 58.98 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 87.2%
- Cores
- 9,216
- Power
- -
- 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.
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 | - SGI Altix 4700 | SGI HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.orgweb.archive.org |
| CPU | - Intel Itanium 2 Montecito dual-core 1.6GHz (Itanium 9040) | Intel | - | Reported | top500.orgweb.archive.org |
| Interconnect | - SGI NUMAlink 4 | SGI HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.orgweb.archive.org |
| Operating system | - SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 | SUSE | - | Reported | top500.orgweb.archive.org |
The read
SGI Altix 4700 shared-memory system at the Air Force Research Laboratory DoD Supercomputing Resource Center, Wright-Patterson AFB. TOP500 lists Itanium 2 Montecito 2C 1.6GHz processors on NUMAlink running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, 9,216 cores, Rmax 51.44 TFlop/s and Rpeak 58.98 TFlop/s; it first appeared 21st on the November 2007 list and was last listed 484th in November 2011. An AFRL DSRC hardware page captured by the Internet Archive in 2010 describes Hawk as an SGI Altix 4700 rated at 59 TFLOPS with dual-core Intel Itanium 9040 processors at 1.6 GHz, NUMAlink 4, SLES 10 SP3 and 400 TB of CXFS workspace; processor, clock and peak agree across the two independent sources. TOP500 now credits HPE as manufacturer after the SGI acquisition. Named Hawk (AFRL) to distinguish it from HLRS Hawk and Cardiff Hawk.
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
AFRL DSRC (Wright-Patterson AFB)
- Location
- Wright-Patterson AFB, OH, USA
Change history
- 2026-10-09 Added Hawk (AFRL)
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.
Every source cited on this page was readable, and none of them mentions this system. They are cited at page granularity, normally because no stable deep link could be found. That is a real weakness in this row and it is why the system carries a confidence tier below verified. See how this check works.
| Cited source | Result | Found on the page |
|---|---|---|
| web.archive.org | does not name this system | - |
| top500.org | does not name this system | - |
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.