Supercomputers/Systems/Bluefire
USA · decommissioned · hpc
Bluefire
Also known as NCAR Bluefire IBM Power 575
Operated by NCAR .
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
- 57.73 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 76.40 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 75.6%
- Cores
- 4,064
- Power
- 649 kW
- Per watt
- 0.1 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 | - Power 575 Hydro-Cluster, p6 4.7 GHz | IBM | - | Reported | top500.orgcisl.ucar.edu |
| CPU | - POWER6 2C 4.7GHz | IBM | - | Reported | top500.orgcisl.ucar.edu |
| Cooling | Direct-to-chip cold plate Cooling Cold plate on the package, air for the remainder · Removes roughly 50-80 percent of node heat to liquid Water-chilled copper plates in direct contact with each POWER6 chip | IBM | - | Reported | cisl.ucar.edu |
| Operating system | IBM AIX Operating systems Unix (System V-derived) · Proprietary AIX | IBM | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
NCAR's IBM Power 575 Hydro-Cluster, a water-cooled POWER6 cluster, 44th on the November 2008 TOP500. TOP500 lists 4,064 POWER6 2-core 4.7 GHz processors on InfiniBand running AIX at 57.73 TFlop/s Rmax and 76.4 TFlop/s Rpeak on that list. NCAR's CISL history page independently confirms 128 Power 575 nodes, 77 teraflops peak, 12.22 TB of memory, water-chilled copper plates on each POWER6 chip, 538.2 kW and a service life from 24 April 2008 to 31 January 2013, during which it delivered more than 162 million core-hours. TOP500 reports 649 kW and CISL 538.2 kW. The physical machine room is not stated in the cited pages, so no site is attached. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, so the tier is reported.
Timeline
- 2008-04-24 First operational source
- 2008-11 List debut at #44 (November 2008) source
- 2013-01-31 Decommissioned 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
- 2026-10-02 Added Bluefire, NCAR's IBM POWER6 cluster, 44th on the November 2008 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.
| Cited source | Result | Found on the page |
|---|---|---|
| top500.org | names system only | - |
| cisl.ucar.edu | 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.
Programming a supercomputer
The software stack beneath the application, and why the OS is now a sovereignty signal as much as a technical choice.