ASCI Blue Mountain

Operated by Los Alamos National Laboratory at Los Alamos Strategic Computing Complex .

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: 1.61 TFlop/s
Rpeak: 3.07 TFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 52.3%
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	- SGI Origin 2000 cluster	SGI HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Verified	top500.org energy.gov
CPU	SGI Origin 2000 (MIPS R10000) CPUs MIPS IV · 1C · 0.25 GHz · 350 nm MIPS R10000 250MHz, 48 Origin 2000 nodes of 128 CPUs each	SGI HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	6,144 reported	Reported	top500.org
Interconnect	HIPPI Interconnect 800 Mbit/s per HIPPI-800 link HIPPI	SGI HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Reported	top500.org
Operating system	IRIX Operating systems IRIX	SGI HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Reported	top500.org

The read

LANL's cluster of 48 SGI Origin 2000 nodes joined by HIPPI, installed in November 1998 and second on the June 1999 TOP500 at 1.608 TFlop/s Rmax, the first ASCI Blue-series machine to follow ASCI Red. NNSA's own retrospective independently names SGI as builder and gives roughly 3 TFlop/s peak, consistent with TOP500's 3.072 TFlop/s Rpeak, and credits the machine with simulations for the W88 pit-rebuild programme. Sources outside TOP500 and NNSA place its retirement around November 2004, but that date traces back to Wikipedia alone among what we could fetch, so no decommissioned_date is recorded. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, Rpeak and core count, so the tier is reported.

Timeline

1998-11 First operational source
1999-06 List debut at #2 (June 1999) source

Public list appearances

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

#2: TOP500, June 1999 →

Site & facility

Los Alamos Strategic Computing Complex

Location: Los Alamos, NM, USA
Cooling: Chilled water
Commissioned: 1993

lanl.gov

Change history

2026-09-24 Added with a rank pointer on the edition where it ranked highest

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
energy.gov	names system only	-
top500.org	names system, part and count	HIPPI, IRIX · counts: 6144

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