Supercomputers/Systems/NCEP Tide
USA · operational · hpc
NCEP Tide
Also known as Tide
Operated by NOAA .
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
- 705.90 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 776.09 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 91.0%
- Cores
- 37,312
- Power
- 775.04 kW
- Per watt
- 0.9 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 NCEP Tide, and those in USA. Computed from our tables; a metric is ranked only when at least eight peers report it.
| Metric | Value | Against its era | Against its country |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rmax | 705.90 TFlop/s | #90 of 227 · top 39% | #195 of 332 · bottom 42% |
| Energy efficiency | 0.9 GF/W | #116 of 186 · bottom 39% | #101 of 162 · bottom 39% |
| Rmax ÷ Rpeak | 91.0 % | #24 of 226 · top 10% | #15 of 331 · top 4% |
| Power draw | 775 kW | #67 of 188 · top 35% | #72 of 171 · top 42% |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Integrator | - IBM iDataPlex DX360M4 | IBM | - | Reported | top500.orgnextplatform.com |
| CPU | Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPUs x86-64 · 8C · 2.6 GHz · 32 nm · 115 W Intel Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.6GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond Infiniband FDR (56 Gb/s) | Mellanox NVDANASDAQ
rolls up to NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.orgnextplatform.com |
| Storage | IBM Spectrum Scale ESS (GPFS) Storage Parallel filesystem (GPFS), erasure-coded declustered RAID · 250 PB on Summit (Alpine) · About 2.5 TB/s 8.1 PB GPFS parallel file system shared with the Cray XC40 systems | IBM | - | Reported | nextplatform.com |
| Operating system | Red Hat Enterprise Linux Operating systems Linux distribution · Open source, commercial support subscription Red Hat Enterprise Linux | Red Hat | - | Reported | nextplatform.com |
Engineering, funding and access
What NCEP Tide runs on, who paid for it and how people get time on it. Each line carries who said it and when.
Hardware
| Item | Detail | As of | Basis | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Interconnect and topology | 56 Gb/s FDR InfiniBand | 2016-01 | Press report | nextplatform.com |
Software
| Item | Detail | As of | Basis | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Job scheduler | IBM LSF | 2016-01 | Press report | nextplatform.com |
| Programming and software stack | Red Hat Enterprise Linux | 2016-01 | Press report | nextplatform.com |
Funding
| Item | Detail | As of | Basis | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Procurement | IBM iDataPlex under the ten-year WCOSS contract worth USD 502 million, awarded March 2011; first fired up July 2013; expanded January 2015The contract value covers the whole WCOSS program, not Tide alone. | 2016-01 | Press report | nextplatform.com |
The read
One of the two IBM iDataPlex DX360M4 clusters of NOAA's Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System, the one in the Virginia data center; its twin Gyre (ncep-gyre) sits in the Orlando backup center. Next Platform dates the first firing-up of the pair to July 2013 and says IBM added iDataPlex nodes in January 2015, taking each cluster to about 830 TFlop/s peak (167 TFlop/s at first, then 64 and 599 TFlop/s added). TOP500 lists 37,312 cores of Xeon E5-2670, 705.9 TFlop/s Rmax, 776.09 TFlop/s Rpeak and 775.04 kW, with 2012 as the installation year; the 776 TFlop/s peak is below Next Platform's 830 TFlop/s figure and the dataset records TOP500's numbers. Both iDataPlex clusters shared an 8.1 PB GPFS file system with the Cray XC40 pair that was accepted in December 2015 (noaa-luna and noaa-surge). Listed from June 2015 to November 2017, falling from rank 103 to 379. Only the TOP500 page gives Rmax and Rpeak, so the tier is reported.
Timeline
- 2011-03 NOAA awarded IBM the ten-year, USD 502 million WCOSS contract under which Tide and Gyre were built source
- 2013-07 First operational source
- 2015-01 IBM added iDataPlex nodes, taking the WCOSS iDataPlex capacity to about 830 teraflops of aggregate compute source
- 2016-06 List debut at #147 (June 2016) source
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Change history
- 2026-10-17 NCEP Tide added from its source pages
Nearby in scale
The machines closest to NCEP Tide by Rmax, smaller to larger.
- BEM · Poland, operational · 0.7 PFlop/s
- Dammam (2017) · Saudi Arabia, operational · 0.69 PFlop/s
- Galileo · Italy, decommissioned · 0.68 PFlop/s
- NCEP Gyre · USA, operational · 0.71 PFlop/s
- Owens · USA, decommissioned · 0.71 PFlop/s
- Blue Brain IV · Switzerland, decommissioned · 0.72 PFlop/s
Related systems
Same operator
- NCEP Gyre · USA, operational, 2013
- NOAA Luna · USA, operational, 2015
- NOAA Surge · USA, operational, 2015
- Hera · USA, operational, 2019
- Gaea · USA, operational, 2023
- NOAA FSL HPTi Xeon Cluster · USA, operational, 2002
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 |
|---|---|---|
| nextplatform.com | names system and part | Intel Xeon E5-2670, Mellanox InfiniBand FDR |
| top500.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon E5-2670, Mellanox InfiniBand FDR |
Checked 2026-10-18 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.