Supercomputers/Systems/Astra
USA · operational · hpc
Astra
Also known as Sandia Vanguard Astra
Operated by Sandia National Laboratories .
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
- 1.83 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 2.30 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 79.6%
- Cores
- 143,640
- Power
- 1.19 MW
- Per watt
- 1.5 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 | - HPE Apollo 70, deployed with Westwind Computing Products | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.orgvanguard.sandia.gov |
| CPU | - Cavium/Marvell ThunderX2 CN9975 28C 2GHz Arm, 2,592 dual-socket nodes | Marvell | - | Reported | vanguard.sandia.govtop500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand EDR Interconnect Fat tree · 100 Gb/s per 4x port · About 0.9 microseconds 4xEDR InfiniBand | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Storage | - Apollo A4520 enclosures, 350 TB all-flash Lustre appliance | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
The first large Arm-based petascale system and the first prototype of Sandia's NNSA Vanguard programme. Sandia's Vanguard page describes 2,592 dual-socket nodes of 28-core Cavium ThunderX2 Arm processors, more than 2.3 PFlop/s peak, deployed with Westwind Computing Products and HPE; TOP500's news item adds 350 TB of all-flash Lustre storage and about 1.2 MW for the compute nodes and dates installation to late summer 2018. TOP500 lists an HPE Apollo 70 with Marvell ThunderX2 CN9975 28C 2GHz and EDR InfiniBand, 143,640 cores, Rmax 1.83 PFlop/s, Rpeak 2.30 PFlop/s and 1,192.54 kW. It first appeared on the November 2018 list at rank 204 and last in November 2022 at rank 467. No retirement notice was found.
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
- 2026-10-07 Added Astra, Sandia's Arm-based Vanguard prototype
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 | Mellanox InfiniBand EDR |
| vanguard.sandia.gov | names system only | - |
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.