Cascade (PNNL)

Also known as EMSL Cascade; HPCS-4A

Operated by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory at EMSL at PNNL (Richland) .

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: 2.54 PFlop/s
Rpeak: 3.39 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 74.9%
Cores: 194,616
Power: 1.38 MW
Per watt: 1.8 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	- Atipa Visione IF442 blade server, 1,440 nodes in 42 racks	Atipa Technologies	-	Reported	top500.org theregister.com
Accelerator	- Intel Xeon Phi 5110P coprocessors, two per node on 1,440 nodes	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	theregister.com top500.org
CPU	Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPUs x86-64 · 8C · 2.6 GHz · 32 nm · 115 W Intel Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.6GHz, two per node	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	theregister.com top500.org
Interconnect	Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond Mellanox FDR InfiniBand 56Gb/s	NVIDIA NVDANASDAQ	-	Reported	theregister.com top500.org
Storage	- 2.7 PB shared file system from DataDirect Networks	DDN	-	Reported	theregister.com

The read

Atipa Visione IF442 blade cluster for the DOE Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) on the PNNL campus in Richland, Washington. The Register's January 2013 report describes 1,440 nodes in 42 racks, each with two eight-core Xeon E5-2670 CPUs and two 60-core Xeon Phi 5110P coprocessors on Mellanox FDR InfiniBand, 128 GB of memory per node, a 2.7 PB DDN shared file system, 3.4 PFlop/s peak, a cost of about 17 million dollars and a target date of October 2013. TOP500 lists 194,616 cores, Rmax 2.539 PFlop/s, Rpeak 3.388 PFlop/s and 1,384 kW; it ranked 14th on the November 2013 list and was still on the list at rank 481 in June 2025, across 24 lists.

Timeline

2013 First operational source
2013-01 Announced source
2013-11 List debut at #14 (November 2013) source

Public list appearances

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

#14: TOP500, November 2013 →

Site & facility

EMSL at PNNL (Richland)

Location: Richland, WA, USA

theregister.com

Change history

2026-10-07 Added Cascade, the EMSL cluster at PNNL

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	Intel Xeon E5-2670, Mellanox InfiniBand FDR
theregister.com	does not name this system	Intel Xeon E5-2670, Mellanox InfiniBand FDR

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