ALMA Correlator

Also known as ALMA baseline correlator

Operated by ALMA Observatory at ALMA Array Operations Site .

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: -
Rpeak: -
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: -
Cores: -
Power: 140 kW
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	- Custom correlator designed and built by NRAO, 134 million processors	NRAO	-	Reported	eso.org

The read

A special-purpose supercomputer that combines the signals of up to 64 antennas of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array into images, housed in the Array Operations Site technical building at 5,000 m altitude in northern Chile, where ESO says it draws about 140 kW and needs twice the normal airflow for cooling and cannot use spinning disks. Designed and built by the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory, it has 134 million processors and performs up to 17 quadrillion operations per second (integer correlation operations, not floating-point, so no FLOPS figure is recorded). ESO states it was fully installed and tested by 21 December 2012 after partial operation from 2011, and NRAO independently gives the same 17 quadrillion operations per second, the four-quadrant layout and the high-altitude site, so the tier is verified.

Timeline

2011 First operational source

Site & facility

ALMA Array Operations Site

Location: Llano de Chajnantor, Atacama, Chile
Commissioned: 2012

eso.org public.nrao.edu

Change history

2026-10-01 Added ALMA Correlator (ALMA Observatory)

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
public.nrao.edu	names system only	-
eso.org	blocked our fetch	-

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