Supercomputers/Systems/PLCI
Saudi Arabia · operational · hpc
PLCI
Also known as PLCI+PLCH
Operated by Saudi Aramco .
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
- 63.15 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 72.01 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 87.7%
- Cores
- 6,144
- 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 | - Dell PowerEdge M610 cluster supplied by ClusterVision and Dell | Dell Technologies | - | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | Intel Xeon X5670 CPUs x86-64 · 6C · 2.93 GHz · 32 nm · 95 W Intel Xeon X5670 6C 2.93GHz, 6,144 cores | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR Interconnect Fat tree · 40 Gb/s per 4x port InfiniBand QDR | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
A Saudi Aramco Dell PowerEdge M610 blade cluster supplied by ClusterVision and Dell, with Xeon X5670 6C 2.93GHz processors on InfiniBand QDR, running Linux with Intel 11 compilers and mvapich2. TOP500 lists it as PLCI at 6,144 cores, 63.15 TFlop/s Rmax and 72.01 TFlop/s Rpeak from November 2010 (rank 122), and as PLCI+PLCH at 12,240 cores, 107.2 TFlop/s Rmax and 143.45 TFlop/s Rpeak in the November 2012 and June 2013 lists; the figures here are the original 6,144-core configuration. Last appeared at rank 420 on June 2013, which is the basis for the status date.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Change history
- 2026-10-09 Added PLCI
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 X5670, Mellanox InfiniBand QDR |
| top500.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon X5670, Mellanox InfiniBand QDR |
Checked 2026-10-13 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.