Supercomputers/Systems/Big Red 200
USA · operational · mixed
Big Red 200
Operated by Indiana University .
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
- 2.43 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 3.04 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 79.9%
- Cores
- 84,480
- 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 | - HPE Cray EX (Shasta) supercomputer | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Verified | top500.orgnews.iu.edu |
| Accelerator | - 256 NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs (GPU addition scheduled for fall 2020) | NVIDIA | 256 reported | Reported | news.iu.edu |
| CPU | AMD EPYC 7742 (Rome) CPUs x86-64 · 64C · 2.25 GHz · 7 nm · 225 W AMD EPYC 7742 64C 2.25GHz (AMD Rome) | AMD | - | Verified | top500.orgnews.iu.edu |
| Interconnect | HPE Slingshot-10 Interconnect Dragonfly · 100 Gb/s per port HPE Cray Slingshot-10 | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Verified | top500.orgnews.iu.edu |
| Cooling | Direct liquid cooling, warm water Cooling Direct-to-chip cold plates, facility water loop · Removes 90+ percent of node heat to liquid Warm-water cooling capability per ASHRAE W3 temperatures | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | news.iu.edu |
| Operating system | SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Operating systems Linux distribution · Open source, commercial support subscription SLES 15 SP2 | SUSE | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
Indiana University's HPE Cray EX (Shasta) supercomputer, dedicated on 20 January 2020 and described by IU as the first Cray Shasta system in production. IU cites nearly 100,000 cores, more than 6 petaFLOPS peak once the 256 NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs planned for fall 2020 were included, AMD Rome processors, Slingshot interconnect and warm-water cooling to ASHRAE W3. TOP500 lists the CPU partition only (AMD EPYC 7742 64C 2.25 GHz, 84,480 cores, Slingshot-10, SLES 15 SP2) at 2.43 PFlop/s Rmax and 3.04 PFlop/s Rpeak, on the list from June 2021 (rank 205) to November 2024 (rank 458); the HPL figures therefore exclude the GPU nodes and are lower than IU's headline peak. IU's news page lists Big Red 200 as operational and supporting research. The tier is verified because TOP500 and IU independently confirm the HPE Cray EX platform, AMD Rome CPUs and Slingshot interconnect. The IU data center location was not stated in the sources fetched, so no site is attached.
Timeline
- 2019 Announced source
- 2020-01 First operational source
- 2021-06 List debut at #205 (June 2021) source
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Change history
- 2026-10-01 Added Big Red 200 (Indiana University)
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 |
|---|---|---|
| news.iu.edu | names system and part | Direct liquid cooling, warm water |
| top500.org | names system and part | AMD EPYC 7742 (Rome), HPE Slingshot-10 |
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.