USA · operational · hpc

Bluecrab

Also known as Blue Crab

Operated by MARCC at MARCC Data Center (Baltimore) .

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: -
Rpeak: 1.40 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: -
Cores: 23,280
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	- Dell PowerEdge servers (R730 GPU nodes, R920 large-memory nodes)	Dell Technologies DELLNYSE	-	Reported	web.archive.org
Accelerator	- NVIDIA Tesla K80 (two per GPU node) and P100 GPUs	NVIDIA NVDANASDAQ	-	Reported	web.archive.org
CPU	- Intel Xeon E5-2680 v3 Haswell, E5-2690 v4 Broadwell, Gold 6126 Skylake and quad-socket E7-8857 v2 Ivy Bridge nodes	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	web.archive.org
Interconnect	Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond FDR-14 InfiniBand with a 2:1 topology	Mellanox NVDANASDAQ rolls up to NVIDIA	-	Reported	web.archive.org
Storage	Lustre Storage Parallel filesystem, separate metadata and object servers 2 PB Lustre (Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre) plus 14 PB ZFS on Linux	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	web.archive.org

The read

Bluecrab, the main cluster at the Maryland Advanced Research Computing Center in Baltimore, shared by Johns Hopkins researchers. An archived MARCC system description (June 2018 figures) gives over 23,000 cores (23,280 in its table) and over 1.4 PFlop/s combined theoretical performance across Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake and Ivy Bridge nodes on Dell PowerEdge servers: 676 standard Haswell nodes, 50 large-memory quad-socket Ivy Bridge nodes with 1 TB, 48 K80 GPU nodes, Broadwell nodes including 24 K80 nodes and P100 condo nodes, and 48 Skylake nodes, on FDR-14 InfiniBand with 2 PB of Lustre (IEEL) and 14 PB of ZFS on Linux. No LINPACK result is published. The Virtual Institute for I/O lists Bluecrab as the MARCC supercomputer in 2017 and 2021. MARCC's later Rockfish cluster is a separate record.

Timeline

No dated events recorded.

Site & facility

MARCC Data Center (Baltimore)

Location: Baltimore, MD, USA

arch.jhu.edu

Change history

2026-10-09 Added Bluecrab

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	Mellanox InfiniBand FDR, Lustre
vi4io.org	names system and part	Lustre

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