Blue Horizon

Also known as SDSC IBM RS/6000 SP

Operated by SDSC at San Diego Supercomputer 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: 929.0 GFlop/s
Rpeak: 1.73 TFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 53.8%
Cores: 1,152
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 sdsc.edu
CPU	IBM POWER3-II CPUs POWER · 1C · 0.375 GHz · 220 nm POWER3 375 MHz, 1,152 processors in 8-way nodes	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	top500.org sdsc.edu
Interconnect	IBM SP Switch Interconnect multi-stage Omega network · 150 MB/s per node 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

The IBM RS/6000 SP at the San Diego Supercomputer Center that NPACI called the first teraflops-class computer dedicated to academic researchers. SDSC's 4 November 1998 announcement describes an SP with more than 1,000 Power3 processors and about a teraflop of peak, backed by the NSF, the State of California and the University of California. TOP500 lists the delivered system as 1,152 POWER3 375 MHz processors on the SP Switch under AIX, 929 GFlop/s Rmax and 1,728 GFlop/s peak, eighth on the November 2000 list and listed until June 2004. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, so the tier is reported.

Timeline

1998-11-04 Announced source
2000 First operational source
2000-11 List debut at #8 (November 2000) source

Public list appearances

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

#8: TOP500, November 2000 →

Site & facility

San Diego Supercomputer Center

Location: La Jolla, CA, USA
Commissioned: 2020

sdsc.edu

Change history

2026-10-02 Added Blue Horizon, SDSC's IBM SP, eighth on the November 2000 TOP500

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.

Every source cited on this page was readable, and none of them mentions this system. They are cited at page granularity, normally because no stable deep link could be found. That is a real weakness in this row and it is why the system carries a confidence tier below verified. See how this check works.

Cited source	Result	Found on the page
top500.org	does not name this system	-
sdsc.edu	does not name this system	-

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