Supercomputers/Systems/Chinook
USA · operational · hpc
Chinook
Also known as EMSL Chinook; HP Chinook at PNNL
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
- 97.07 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 159.95 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 60.7%
- Cores
- 18,176
- 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 | - HP Cluster Platform 4000 DL185 G5 cluster | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | - AMD Opteron quad-core 2.2 GHz, 18,176 cores | AMD | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand DDR Interconnect Fat tree · 20 Gb/s per 4x port · About 2 microseconds InfiniBand DDR | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
HP supercomputer of the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) at PNNL in Richland, Washington. The EMSL 2009 Annual Report says Chinook reached final acceptance on 20 March 2009 as a roughly $20 million system with 164 teraflops peak, nearly 15 times faster than the 11.2 teraflop MPP2 it replaced. TOP500 lists an HP Cluster Platform 4000 DL185 G5 with 18,176 Opteron quad-core 2.2 GHz cores on InfiniBand DDR running Linux at 97.07 TFlop/s Rmax and 159.95 TFlop/s Rpeak, 21st in November 2008, then 34th, 48th, 57th, 76th, 91st, 127th, 193rd and 313rd, and last appeared in June 2013 at 493rd. The first operational date is the acceptance date; the machine was already benchmarked for the November 2008 list. Not to be confused with the earlier EMSL MPP2 system.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
Change history
- 2026-10-09 Added Chinook
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 |
|---|---|---|
| pnnl.gov | does not name this system | - |
| top500.org | names system and part | Mellanox InfiniBand DDR |
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.