USA · decommissioned · hpc

Intrepid

Also known as BlueGene/P, Blue Gene/P

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: 458.61 TFlop/s
Rpeak: 557.06 TFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 82.3%
Cores: 163,840
Power: 1.26 MW
Per watt: 0.4 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 eServer Blue Gene Solution	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	alcf.anl.gov ibm.com
CPU	IBM PowerPC 450 850MHz CPUs PowerPC · 4C · 0.85 GHz · 90 nm PowerPC 450 850MHz	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	alcf.anl.gov ibm.com
Interconnect	IBM BlueGene 3D torus Interconnect 3D torus, plus separate collective and barrier networks · 175 MB/s per link per direction integrated 3D torus	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	alcf.anl.gov ibm.com
Storage	DDN S2A9900 Storage Block-storage SAN, parallel filesystem layered on top 128 file servers running both PVFS and GPFS and 16 DataDirect Networks S2A9900 SANs	DDN	-	Reported	mcs.anl.gov
Cooling	Direct liquid cooling, warm water Cooling Direct-to-chip cold plates, facility water loop · Removes 90+ percent of node heat to liquid IBM BlueGene/P: water cooled	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	alcf.anl.gov ibm.com
Operating system	IBM Compute Node Kernel Operating systems Microkernel, no dynamic scheduling · Proprietary Compute Node Kernel	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	alcf.anl.gov ibm.com

The read

The middle generation of the BlueGene line, and with BlueGene/L and Sequoia it gives this dataset all three. The architectural argument is unchanged across them: many deliberately slow, low-power embedded cores with the interconnect on the compute chip, so the bill of materials names one company for the processor, the fabric, the kernel and the integration. Read across the three generations, BlueGene is the clearest case in the dataset of a vendor competing on efficiency rather than clock speed, and of a fabric that never appears in any spec string as a third-party product.

Timeline

2006 Announced source
2008-01 First operational source
2008-06 List debut at #3 (June 2008) source
2014 Decommissioned source

Public list appearances

Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.

#3: TOP500, June 2008 →

Site & facility

Argonne Leadership Computing Facility

Location: Lemont, IL, USA
Cooling: Direct liquid cooling (warm water)
Commissioned: 2006

alcf.anl.gov anl.gov

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
alcf.anl.gov	could not be fetched	-
ibm.com	names system and part	IBM Compute Node Kernel

Checked 2026-10-13 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.