Supercomputers/Systems/CMA PAI-A
China · operational · hpc
CMA PAI-A
Also known as CMA PAI-A System
Operated by China Meteorological Administration at CMA Computing Centre (Beijing) .
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
- 2.44 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 4.00 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 61.0%
- Cores
- 48,128
- Power
- 740 kW
- Per watt
- 3.3 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 | - Sugon TC4600 | Sugon | - | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon Gold 6142 16C 2.6 GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand EDR Interconnect Fat tree · 100 Gb/s per 4x port · About 0.9 microseconds InfiniBand EDR | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
One of two Sugon clusters of the China Meteorological Administration listed on TOP500: a Sugon TC4600 with Xeon Gold 6142 16C 2.6 GHz on InfiniBand EDR, 48,128 cores, 2.44 PFlop/s Rmax, 4.00 PFlop/s Rpeak and 740 kW, installed in 2017, ranked 74 in June 2018 and still listed at 500 in June 2025. TOP500 is the only source consulted; CMA's role as the national weather authority is why the workload is recorded as HPC for weather and climate.
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
- 2026-10-02 Added CMA PAI-A
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 | Mellanox InfiniBand EDR |
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.