USA · decommissioned · hpc

CM-5/1024

Also known as Connection Machine 5

Operated by Los Alamos National Laboratory at Los Alamos Strategic Computing Complex .

Researched with AI assistance, checked by scripts. These rows were researched by AI agents reading public operator, laboratory and vendor sources, appended by scripts and checked by automated validation; no subject-matter expert has reviewed them (how this site is made). A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1350 of 1540 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 64 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: 59.7 GFlop/s
Rpeak: 131.0 GFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 45.6%
Cores: 1,024
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	- Thinking Machines Corporation	Thinking Machines	-	Reported	computerhistory.org
CPU	Thinking Machines CM-5 vector node CPUs SPARC + custom vector · 1C · 0.032 GHz CM-5/1024	Thinking Machines	1,024 reported	Reported	computerhistory.org
Interconnect	Thinking Machines CM-5 fat tree Interconnect Fat tree · 20 MB/s per link CM-5 fat tree data network	Thinking Machines	-	Verified	computerhistory.org bitsavers.org
Storage	Scalable Disk Array Storage Direct-attached disk nodes on the CM-5 data network, NFS-mountable Disk storage nodes plug into the CM-5 to form a Scalable Disk Array (SDA)	Thinking Machines	-	Reported	archive.computerhistory.org
Cooling	Air cooling (CRAC/CRAH) Cooling Room-level air handling · Practical ceiling around 15-20 kW per rack Totally air-cooled	Thinking Machines	-	Reported	archive.computerhistory.org
Operating system	Thinking Machines CMost Operating systems Unix (TMC-proprietary variant) · Proprietary CMost (TMCs Unix variant)	Thinking Machines	-	Reported	netlib.org

The read

The machine at the top of the first published HPL list, and the cleanest illustration of why entity resolution is the hard part of this dataset. Thinking Machines Corporation filed for bankruptcy the following year. There is no surviving corporate parent to attribute the supply chain to: the vendor row simply terminates. Every analysis on this site that rolls installed base up to present-day tickers has to decide what to do with rows like this one, and we resolve it by keeping the historical vendor as a first-class entity with status `defunct` rather than folding it into a successor that does not exist.

Timeline

1991 Announced source
1993-06 List debut at #1 (June 1993) source
1993-06 First operational source

Public list appearances

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

#1: TOP500, June 1993 →

Site & facility

Los Alamos Strategic Computing Complex

Location: Los Alamos, NM, USA
Cooling: Chilled water
Commissioned: 1993

lanl.gov

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.

None of the cited sources could be read from our network: the hosts returned bot challenges or did not respond. This check says nothing about the citations either way. See how this check works.

Cited source	Result	Found on the page
computerhistory.org	blocked our fetch	-

Checked 2026-10-18 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.