Supercomputers/Systems/Blueback
USA · operational · hpc
Blueback
Operated by Navy DSRC at Navy DSRC (Stennis Space 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
- 10.30 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 11.09 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 92.9%
- Cores
- 245,760
- 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 EX4000 | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.orgdefensescoop.com |
| Accelerator | AMD Instinct MI300A Accelerators ROCm (CDNA 3) · TSMC N5/N6 · 550 W AMD Instinct MI300A APUs in AI/ML nodes | AMD | 128 reported | Reported | defensescoop.comexecutivegov.com |
| Accelerator | - NVIDIA L40 GPUs | NVIDIA | 24 reported | Reported | executivegov.com |
| CPU | AMD EPYC 9004 (Genoa) CPUs x86-64 · 96C · 2.4 GHz · TSMC N5 · 360 W AMD EPYC 9654 96C 2.4GHz (CPU partition) | AMD | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | HPE Slingshot-11 Interconnect Dragonfly · 200 Gb/s per port · Around 2 microseconds Slingshot-11 | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Storage | HPE Cray ClusterStor E1000 Storage Lustre appliance, flash and disk tiers · 700 PB on Frontier (Orion) · About 10 TB/s peak 20 PB usable Cray ClusterStor E1000 Lustre storage | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | executivegov.com |
The read
HPE Cray EX4000 system at the Navy DoD Supercomputing Resource Center at Stennis Space Center, Mississippi, bought for about 25 million dollars from the fiscal 2023 HPCMP allocation to replace the older Gaffney, Koehr and a test system. TOP500 lists its CPU partition (Blueback CPU) as AMD EPYC 9654 96C 2.4GHz over Slingshot-11 running HPE Cray OS, with Rmax 10.30 PFlop/s, Rpeak 11.09 PFlop/s and 245,760 cores; it first appeared on the June 2025 list at rank 139 and was 181st in June 2026. A separate TOP500 entry (Blueback GPU) covers the accelerator partition and is not counted here. DefenseScoop reports the 17.7 petaFLOPS system with 128 AMD MI300A APUs and capabilities from NVIDIA, and ExecutiveGov gives 256,512 total compute cores, 24 NVIDIA L40 GPUs and 20 PB of usable ClusterStor E1000 Lustre storage. The 17.7 petaFLOPS figure is a vendor-stated whole-system number and is not recorded; the recorded FLOPS and cores are the TOP500 CPU-partition run.
Timeline
- 2023-08 Announced source
- 2024 First operational source
- 2025-06 List debut at #139 (June 2025) 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
Navy DSRC (Stennis Space Center)
- Location
- Stennis Space Center, MS, USA
Change history
- 2026-10-02 Added Blueback
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 |
|---|---|---|
| defensescoop.com | names system, part and count | HPE Cray ClusterStor E1000 · counts: 128 |
| top500.org | names system and part | AMD EPYC 9004 (Genoa), HPE Slingshot-11, HPE Cray ClusterStor E1000 |
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.