ASCI Blue-Pacific

Also known as ASCI Blue-Pacific SST

Operated by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at Livermore Computing 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: 2.14 TFlop/s
Rpeak: 3.86 TFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 55.6%
Cores: 5,808
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	- IBM RS/6000 SP	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Verified	top500.org asc.llnl.gov
CPU	IBM PowerPC 604e CPUs PowerPC · 1C · 0.332 GHz · 350 nm PowerPC 604e 332MHz, 5,808 cores (SST partition)	IBM IBMNYSE	5,808 reported	Verified	top500.org asc.llnl.gov
Interconnect	IBM SP Switch Interconnect multi-stage Omega network · 150 MB/s per node IBM SP Switch	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	top500.org
Operating system	IBM AIX Operating systems Unix (System V-derived) · Proprietary AIX	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	top500.org

The read

LLNL's IBM RS/6000 SP. Blue-Pacific was built as three named partitions and TOP500 lists each separately; this row is the SST (Simulation and Test) partition, its best-ranked entry, second on the November 1999 TOP500 at 2.144 TFlop/s Rmax. LLNL's own history page independently gives the whole complex as 5,856 PowerPC 604e processors installed in fall 1998 with about 3.9 TFlop/s peak, close enough to TOP500's 5,808-core, 3.8565 TFlop/s Rpeak SST partition to treat as the same machine, and states Blue-Pacific ran the first three-dimensional primary weapon simulation in November 1999. The CTR and TR partitions TOP500 lists separately are not recorded as their own rows. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, Rpeak and core count, so the tier is reported.

Timeline

1998-11 First operational source
1999-11 List debut at #2 (November 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, November 1999 →

Site & facility

Livermore Computing Center

Location: Livermore, CA, USA
Cooling: Direct liquid cooling (warm water)
Commissioned: 1996

hpc.llnl.gov llnl.gov

Change history

2026-09-24 Added (SST partition, TOP500 lists Blue-Pacific as three separate entries)

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
asc.llnl.gov	names system and part	IBM PowerPC 604e
top500.org	names system, part and count	IBM PowerPC 604e · counts: 5808

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