Cheetah (ORNL)

Also known as ORNL IBM pSeries 690

Operated by Oak Ridge National Laboratory at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility .

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: 2.31 TFlop/s
Rpeak: 4.49 TFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 51.4%
Cores: 864
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	- IBM pSeries 690 (27 compute nodes)	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	top500.org en.wikipedia.org
CPU	- IBM POWER4 1.3 GHz	IBM IBMNYSE	864 reported	Reported	top500.org en.wikipedia.org
Interconnect	- IBM Colony switch	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	top500.org
Operating system	IBM AIX Operating systems Unix (System V-derived) · Proprietary AIX	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	top500.org

The read

ORNL's IBM p690 system, 27 compute nodes of thirty-two 1.3 GHz POWER4 processors, which the Center for Computational Sciences lists as a 4.5 TFlop/s machine in service from 2001 to 2008. TOP500 ranked it eighth on the June 2002 list at 2,310 GFlop/s Rmax (864 cores on the Colony interconnect, AIX) and kept it listed through June 2006. The 2008 end date comes from the centre's history table as summarised on Wikipedia. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, so the tier is reported.

Timeline

2002 First operational source
2002-06 List debut at #8 (June 2002) source
2008 Decommissioned source

Public list appearances

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

#8: TOP500, June 2002 →

Site & facility

Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility

Location: Oak Ridge, TN, USA
Utility: Tennessee Valley Authority
Cooling: Direct liquid cooling (warm water)
Commissioned: 1993

olcf.ornl.gov ornl.gov

Change history

2026-10-02 Added Cheetah, ORNL's IBM p690 system, eighth on the June 2002 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
en.wikipedia.org	names system only	-
top500.org	does not name this system	-

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