USA · upgraded · mixed

Perlmutter

Also known as NERSC-9

Operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at NERSC, Shyh Wang Hall .

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: 79.23 PFlop/s
Rpeak: 113.0 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 70.1%
Cores: -
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	- HPE Cray EX235n	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Reported	nersc.gov hpe.com
Accelerator	NVIDIA A100 SXM4 40GB Accelerators CUDA (Ampere GA100) · 6,912C · 1.41 GHz · 7 nm · 400 W NVIDIA A100 SXM4 40 GB	NVIDIA NVDANASDAQ	-	Reported	nersc.gov hpe.com
CPU	AMD EPYC 7763 (Milan) CPUs x86-64 · 64C · 2.45 GHz · 7 nm · 280 W AMD EPYC 7763 64C 2.45GHz	AMD AMDNASDAQ	-	Reported	nersc.gov hpe.com
Interconnect	HPE Slingshot-11 Interconnect Dragonfly · 200 Gb/s per port · Around 2 microseconds Slingshot-11	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Reported	nersc.gov hpe.com
Storage	HPE Cray ClusterStor E1000 Storage Lustre appliance, flash and disk tiers · 700 PB on Frontier (Orion) · About 10 TB/s peak all-flash Lustre on ClusterStor E1000	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Reported	nersc.gov hpe.com
Cooling	Direct liquid cooling, warm water Cooling Direct-to-chip cold plates, facility water loop · Removes 90+ percent of node heat to liquid HPE Cray EX cabinet: 100% direct liquid cooled	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Reported	nersc.gov hpe.com
Operating system	HPE Cray Operating System Operating systems SUSE-derived Linux, container-based management · Proprietary layer over open-source Linux HPE Cray Operating System	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Reported	nersc.gov hpe.com

AI datacenter metrics

Figures beyond an accelerator count, each with who stated it. What can and cannot be compared across AI datacenters.

Metric	Value	As of	Basis	Note	Source
Accelerators	7,168 accelerators	2026-10	Operator stated	NERSC docs: 1,536 GPU nodes with 4 A100 40GB plus 256 nodes with 4 A100 80GB (product computed). Excludes 40 login-node A100s.	docs.nersc.gov

The read

Named for the astrophysicist whose supernova work ran at NERSC. Architecturally a bridge between the CPU-only and accelerator eras, delivered in two phases, and one of the first large AMD-CPU-plus-NVIDIA-GPU pairings at this scale - a combination that is now common and was not obvious in 2018.

Timeline

2018 Announced source
2021-05 First operational source
2021-06 List debut at #5 (June 2021) source

Public list appearances

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

Site & facility

NERSC, Shyh Wang Hall

Location: Berkeley, CA, USA
Cooling: Direct liquid cooling with cooling towers
Commissioned: 2015

nersc.gov

Change history

2026-09-22 Gained a Green500 rank pointer (#28 on the 2023-11 list)

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
hpe.com	does not name this system	Direct liquid cooling, warm water, HPE Cray Operating System, HPE Cray ClusterStor E1000
nersc.gov	names system and part	NVIDIA A100 SXM4 40GB, Direct liquid cooling, warm water, HPE Cray Operating System, HPE Cray ClusterStor E1000

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

Related news

2025-05-29 DOE names Dell and NVIDIA to build NERSC-10, Doudna · NVIDIA Blog
Doudna succeeds Perlmutter at NERSC and is contracted for more than 10x Perlmutter's scientific output on 2 to 3x the power, an efficiency target that puts a specific number on the performance-per-watt gains this dataset already tracks across GPU generations. It ships on unreleased NVIDIA Vera Rubin parts, so nothing in the graph attaches to it yet beyond the contract.

All news →