USA · decommissioned · classified

Sequoia

Also known as BlueGene/Q, Blue Gene/Q

Operated by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at Livermore Computing Center .

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: 17.17 PFlop/s
Rpeak: 20.13 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 85.3%
Cores: 1,572,864
Power: 7.89 MW
Per watt: 2.2 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 BlueGene/Q	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	hpc.llnl.gov energy.gov
CPU	IBM PowerPC A2 (Power BQC) CPUs PowerPC A2 · 18C · 1.6 GHz · 45 nm · 55 W Power BQC 16C 1.60 GHz	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	hpc.llnl.gov energy.gov
Interconnect	IBM BlueGene/Q 5D torus Interconnect 5D torus · 2 GB/s per link per direction 5D torus	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	hpc.llnl.gov energy.gov
Storage	IBM Spectrum Scale ESS (GPFS) Storage Parallel filesystem (GPFS), erasure-coded declustered RAID · 250 PB on Summit (Alpine) · About 2.5 TB/s IBM GPFS	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	hpc.llnl.gov energy.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/Q: water cooled	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	hpc.llnl.gov energy.gov
Operating system	IBM Compute Node Kernel Operating systems Microkernel, no dynamic scheduling · Proprietary Compute Node Kernel	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	hpc.llnl.gov energy.gov

The read

The high-water mark of the BlueGene line: 1.57 million cores at 1.6 GHz, and an Rmax-to-Rpeak ratio of 85% that most heterogeneous systems still do not reach. Like every BlueGene, the fabric is IBM's own and appears in no spec string as a separate vendor, which is why fabric-share charts that read only the interconnect field understate IBM's historical position.

Timeline

2009 Announced source
2012-06 List debut at #1 (June 2012) source
2012-06 First operational source
2020-01 Decommissioned January 31 to make room for the incoming El Capitan system source
2020-01 Decommissioned source

Public list appearances

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

#1: TOP500, June 2012 →

Site & facility

Livermore Computing Center

Location: Livermore, CA, USA
Cooling: Direct liquid cooling (warm water)
Commissioned: 1996

hpc.llnl.gov llnl.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
asc.llnl.gov	names system and part	IBM Compute Node Kernel
top500.org	names system and part	IBM BlueGene/Q 5D torus

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