Supercomputers/Systems/Cayenne (Sandia)
USA · operational · hpc
Cayenne (Sandia)
Also known as SNL/NNSA CTS-1 Cayenne
Operated by Sandia National Laboratories .
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
- 1.22 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 1.36 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 90.2%
- Cores
- 40,392
- Power
- 480 kW
- Per watt
- 2.5 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 | - Penguin Computing Tundra Extreme Scale | Penguin Computing | - | Verified | top500.orghpc.sandia.gov |
| CPU | Intel Xeon E5-2695 v4 CPUs x86-64 · 18C · 2.1 GHz · 14 nm · 120 W Intel Xeon E5-2695 v4 18C 2.1GHz, two sockets per node, 1,122 nodes | Intel | - | Verified | top500.orghpc.sandia.gov |
| Interconnect | Omni-Path Architecture Interconnect Fat tree · 100 Gb/s per port · About 1 microsecond Intel Omni-Path | Cornelis Networks | - | Verified | top500.orghpc.sandia.gov |
The read
Sandia capacity cluster under the NNSA CTS-1 contract, sibling of Serrano: a Penguin Computing Tundra Extreme Scale system of dual 18-core Xeon E5-2695v4 2.1GHz nodes on Intel Omni-Path running Linux/TOSS. Sandia's HPC cluster page lists Cayenne at 1,122 nodes and 40,392 cores deployed in February 2017 with Penguin as vendor, matching the TOP500 core count; TOP500 lists Rmax 1.2237 and Rpeak 1.3572 PFlop/s at 480 kW, first ranked 86th in November 2016, 99th in June 2017 and 456th in November 2019 (277th in November 2018). An Asetek press release names Cayenne, Serrano and Eclipse as clusters installed by Penguin Computing under the CTS-1 contract with Asetek liquid cooling.
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
- 2026-10-09 Added Cayenne (Sandia)
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 |
|---|---|---|
| hpc.sandia.gov | names system and part | Intel Xeon E5-2695 v4, Omni-Path Architecture |
| top500.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon E5-2695 v4, Omni-Path Architecture |
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.