Supercomputers/Systems/Cardinal
USA · operational · mixed
Cardinal
Also known as OSC Cardinal (GPU partition)
Operated by Ohio 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
- 5.04 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 7.58 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 66.5%
- Cores
- 18,960
- Power
- 82.6 kW
- Per watt
- 61.0 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 | - Dell PowerEdge XE9640 (GPU nodes), C6620 (compute nodes) | Dell Technologies | - | Verified | top500.orgosc.edu |
| Accelerator | NVIDIA H100 SXM5 94GB Accelerators CUDA (Hopper GH100) · 16,896C · 1.98 GHz · TSMC 4N · 700 W 32 nodes x 4 NVIDIA H100 94GB | NVIDIA | 128 reported | Verified | osc.edutop500.org |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon Platinum 8470 52C 2GHz (GPU nodes) | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | NVIDIA InfiniBand NDR (Quantum-2) Interconnect Fat tree or dragonfly+ · 400 Gb/s per port · Under 0.6 microseconds ConnectX-7 NDR Infiniband (NDR200 and NDR400) | NVIDIA | - | Verified | top500.orgosc.edu |
The read
The Ohio Supercomputer Center's Dell-built Cardinal cluster. OSC describes 32 PowerEdge XE9640 GPU nodes with four NVIDIA H100 94GB GPUs each (128 in total) plus 326 dense compute nodes with Intel Xeon CPU Max processors, on NDR InfiniBand with direct-to-chip liquid cooling in nine racks, about 10.5 petaflops theoretical peak overall. TOP500 lists the GPU partition at 18,960 cores, Rmax 5.04 PFlop/s, Rpeak 7.58 PFlop/s and 82.6 kW; it first ranked 211th on the November 2024 list and 306th on June 2026. OSC's page does not give an installation site beyond Columbus, so no site is attached.
Timeline
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 Cardinal, the Ohio Supercomputer Center's H100 system, 211th on the November 2024 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 and part | NVIDIA H100 SXM5 94GB |
| osc.edu | names system, part and count | NVIDIA H100 SXM5 94GB, NVIDIA InfiniBand NDR (Quantum-2) · counts: 128 |
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
Why accelerators exist, what the memory hierarchy costs, and how the CPU and accelerator merged onto one package.
The interconnect
Topologies, why latency and tail behaviour matter more than bandwidth, and how the fabric market consolidated.