Supercomputers/Systems/Antero 2 (NCAR C90)
USA · decommissioned · hpc
Antero 2 (NCAR C90)
Also known as CRI Cray C90 Antero; Antero 2
Operated by NCAR at NCAR Mesa Laboratory (Boulder) .
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
- 15.6 GFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- -
- Cores
- 16
- Power
- 493.5 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.
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 | - Cray Research, Inc. Cray C90, 16 processors | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | cisl.ucar.edu |
| CPU | - Cray C90 vector processors, 4 ns clock period | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | 16 reported | Reported | cisl.ucar.edu |
| Operating system | - UNICOS | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | cisl.ucar.edu |
The read
A 16-processor Cray C90 added in December 1996 for NCAR's Climate Simulation Laboratory, the second NCAR machine named Antero (the first was a Y-MP/8I). NCAR's page puts it in use from 1 January 1997 and says it offered more than four times the computing power of its predecessor, supplying 10,400 CPU hours per month to climate users and letting the NCAR Climate System Model average about 5.2 GFLOPS and simulate five years per day. It had a 4 ns clock period, 256 megawords (2 GB) of central memory, 8 GB of solid-state disk, 250 GB of disk and HIPPI to the mass storage system, and ran UNICOS. The 493.5 kW and 15.6 GFLOPS peak figures are from NCAR's supercomputing-history table. It was decommissioned on 30 November 1999. NCAR is the only source fetched, so the tier is reported.
Site & facility
NCAR Mesa Laboratory (Boulder)
- Location
- Boulder, CO, USA
- Commissioned
- 1986
Change history
- 2026-10-09 Added Antero 2 (NCAR C90)
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 |
|---|---|---|
| cisl.ucar.edu | names system only | - |
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.
Programming a supercomputer
The software stack beneath the application, and why the OS is now a sovereignty signal as much as a technical choice.