USA · operational · mixed

Aurora

Deep dive: Aurora: eight years from contract to first list

Also known as A21

Operated by Argonne National Laboratory at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility .

Researched with AI assistance, checked by scripts. These rows were researched by AI agents reading public operator, laboratory and vendor sources, appended by scripts and checked by automated validation; no subject-matter expert has reviewed them (how this site is made). A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1350 of 1540 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 64 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: 1.01 EFlop/s
Rpeak: 1.98 EFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 51.1%
Cores: 9,264,128
Power: 38.70 MW
Per watt: 26.2 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 Cray EX	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Reported	alcf.anl.gov intel.com
Accelerator	Intel Data Center GPU Max 1550 Accelerators oneAPI (Xe-HPC) · Intel 7 / TSMC N5 · 600 W Intel Data Center GPU Max, 6 per node	Intel INTCNASDAQ	63,744 reported	Reported	alcf.anl.gov intel.com
CPU	Intel Xeon CPU Max 9470 CPUs x86-64 · 52C · 2 GHz · Intel 7 · 350 W Xeon CPU Max 9470 52C, 2 per node	Intel INTCNASDAQ	21,248 reported	Reported	alcf.anl.gov intel.com
Interconnect	HPE Slingshot-11 Interconnect Dragonfly · 200 Gb/s per port · Around 2 microseconds Slingshot-11	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Reported	alcf.anl.gov intel.com
Storage	Intel DAOS Storage Object store, no POSIX layer underneath · 230 PB on Aurora · About 31 TB/s DAOS, 230 PB	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	alcf.anl.gov intel.com
Cooling	Direct liquid cooling, warm water Cooling Direct-to-chip cold plates, facility water loop · Removes 90+ percent of node heat to liquid direct liquid cooled cabinet	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Reported	alcf.anl.gov intel.com
Operating system	HPE Cray Operating System Operating systems SUSE-derived Linux, container-based management · Proprietary layer over open-source Linux HPE Cray Operating System	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Reported	alcf.anl.gov intel.com

AI datacenter metrics

Figures beyond an accelerator count, each with who stated it. What can and cannot be compared across AI datacenters.

Metric	Value	As of	Basis	Note	Source
Accelerators	63,744 accelerators	2023-07	Operator stated	Argonne release: 10,624 blades, 6 Intel Max GPUs each (product computed); the second page states 63,744 directly.	news.uchicago.edu glennklockwood.com
Stated investment	0.5 USD bn	2019-03	Operator stated	DOE 2019 announcement: contract valued at over $500M (Intel prime, Cray subcontractor). Original contract value, not final cost; excludes facility.	energy.gov

Published benchmark results

HPL-MxP 2025-11: HPL-MxP mixed-precision (rank 2), 11.643 EFlop/s (independent, 2025-11) hpl-mxp.org top500.org
HPL-MxP 2026-06: HPL-MxP mixed-precision (rank 2), 11.6 EFlop/s (independent, 2026-06) top500.org top500.org

The read

The longest gap between announcement and first light of any system in this dataset: contracted in 2015 around a Xeon Phi design that was cancelled, redesigned around Ponte Vecchio, and delivered eight years later. That lag is the single data point most responsible for the shape of our announcement-to-first-light chart, and it is a vendor-execution story rather than a facility one. Two Xeon Max CPUs and six Data Center GPU Max accelerators per node, on HPE Slingshot-11: a rare case of the accelerator and integrator roles sitting with different companies at this scale.

Timeline

2015 Announced source
2023-11 List debut at #2 (November 2023) source
2023-12 First operational source

Public list appearances

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

Site & facility

Argonne Leadership Computing Facility

Location: Lemont, IL, USA
Cooling: Direct liquid cooling (warm water)
Commissioned: 2006

alcf.anl.gov anl.gov

Change history

2026-10-04 AI benchmark record: hpl-mxp 2025-11
2026-10-04 AI benchmark record: hpl-mxp 2026-06
2026-09-22 Gained a Green500 rank pointer (#37 on the 2023-11 list)

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.

One cited source was readable and does not mention this system; another could not be read because the host returned a bot challenge. The unreadable one may well be fine, so this is weaker evidence than a corroborated row and much stronger than an unsupported one. See how this check works.

Cited source	Result	Found on the page
alcf.anl.gov	could not be fetched	-
intel.com	does not name this system	Intel Data Center GPU Max 1550, Direct liquid cooling, warm water, Intel Xeon CPU Max 9470

Checked 2026-10-18 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.

Related news

2025-11-17 TOP500's 66th list confirms JUPITER as the first exascale system outside the US · TOP500
El Capitan holds number one at a remeasured 1.809 exaflop/s and Frontier and Aurora hold two and three, so all three US exascale systems in this dataset keep their relative order. JUPITER's 1.000 exaflop/s Booster partition becomes the fourth exascale system worldwide and the first in Europe, confirming the milestone this dataset's earlier rows on Bull's JUPITER delivery had been building toward.
2023-12-01 Aurora enters service at Argonne · Argonne Leadership Computing Facility
Eight years after contract award, following the cancellation of its original Xeon Phi design and a redesign around Ponte Vecchio. The longest announcement-to-first-light gap in this dataset.

All news →