USA · operational · hpc

Abel

Operated by PGS at PGS Houston Mega Processing 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: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 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: 4.04 PFlop/s
Rpeak: 5.37 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 75.2%
Cores: 145,920
Power: 1.80 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	- Cray XC (TOP500 labels it XC30; GeekWire/NextPlatform/HPCwire described the order as an XC40)	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Verified	top500.org geekwire.com
CPU	Intel Xeon E5-2698 v3 CPUs x86-64 · 16C · 2.3 GHz · 22 nm · 135 W Xeon E5-2698 v3 16C 2.3GHz nodes totaling 145,920 cores	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org
Interconnect	Cray Aries Interconnect Dragonfly · About 10 GB/s per direction · Around 1 microsecond Aries interconnect	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Verified	top500.org nextplatform.com

The read

PGS's seismic-imaging supercomputer at its Houston Mega Processing Center, named after Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel. Ordered from Cray in March 2015 as a roughly 5 PFlop/s liquid-cooled system with Aries interconnect (GeekWire, NextPlatform and HPCwire all covered the deal), used for Reverse Time Migration and Full Waveform Inversion processing including the PGS Triton survey in the Gulf of Mexico. TOP500 lists the installed machine as Rmax 4.04 PFlop/s, Rpeak 5.37 PFlop/s, 145,920 Xeon E5-2698 v3 cores, and labels the system type Cray XC30 even though contemporary press described the order as an XC40; that label discrepancy is unresolved in the sources found. First appeared on the June 2015 TOP500 list at rank 13 and was still listed as of November 2025 at rank 320. PGS itself was acquired by TGS ASA in July 2024, so the operator company row (pgs) is marked acquired with tgs as parent.

Timeline

2015-03 Announced source
2015-06 List debut at #13 (June 2015) source
2015-06 First operational source

Public list appearances

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

#13: TOP500, June 2015 →

Site & facility

PGS Houston Mega Processing Center

Location: Houston, TX, USA
Commissioned: 2015

top500.org geekwire.com

Change history

2026-09-27 Abel added, PGS's (now TGS) Cray seismic-imaging supercomputer at its Houston Mega Processing Center

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
top500.org	names system and part	Intel Xeon E5-2698 v3, Cray Aries
geekwire.com	could not be fetched	-

Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.