Supercomputers/Systems/AiMOS
USA · operational · mixed
AiMOS
Also known as Artificial Intelligence Multiprocessing Optimized System
Operated by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at RPI Computational Innovations .
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
- 8.34 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 11.03 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 75.6%
- Cores
- 130,000
- Power
- 512.08 kW
- Per watt
- 16.3 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 Power System AC922 | IBM | - | Verified | top500.orgnews.rpi.edu |
| Accelerator | - NVIDIA Volta GV100 GPUs | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.orgnews.rpi.edu |
| CPU | - IBM POWER9 20C 3.45GHz | IBM | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand EDR Interconnect Fat tree · 100 Gb/s per 4x port · About 0.9 microseconds Dual-rail Mellanox EDR Infiniband | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Operating system | Red Hat Enterprise Linux Operating systems Linux distribution · Open source, commercial support subscription RHEL 7.6 | Red Hat | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's IBM Power System AC922 with POWER9 CPUs and NVIDIA Volta GPUs, built on the technology of the Summit and Sierra machines and designed by IBM as a testbed for the New York State-IBM Research AI Hardware Center, in collaboration with Empire State Development and NY CREATES. RPI unveiled it on 5 December 2019 as the most powerful supercomputer at a private university and 24th on the November 2019 TOP500, its best rank; it was still listed at 217th in June 2026. TOP500 lists IBM POWER9 20C 3.45GHz, NVIDIA Volta GV100, dual-rail Mellanox EDR InfiniBand and RHEL 7.6 with 130,000 cores, Rmax 8.34 PFlop/s, Rpeak 11.03 PFlop/s and 512 kW. RPI's news release gives no node or GPU counts, so no quantity is recorded. Workload is mixed because it is both an AI-hardware testbed and a shared academic and industry research machine.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
Change history
- 2026-10-02 Added AiMOS, the RPI IBM POWER9 AI testbed, 24th on the November 2019 TOP500
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 |
|---|---|---|
| news.rpi.edu | names system only | - |
| top500.org | names system and part | Mellanox InfiniBand EDR |
Checked 2026-10-09 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.