Supercomputers/Systems/Cplant Siberia
USA · decommissioned · hpc
Cplant Siberia
Also known as Sandia Computational Plant Siberia cluster
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
- 232.6 GFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 580.0 GFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 40.1%
- Cores
- 580
- 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 | - Self-built commodity cluster (Computational Plant) | Sandia National Laboratories | - | Reported | top500.orgnewsreleases.sandia.gov |
| CPU | - Compaq Alpha EV6 500 MHz, 580 cores | Compaq HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.orgnewsreleases.sandia.gov |
| Interconnect | - Myrinet | Myricom | - | Reported | top500.orgnewsreleases.sandia.gov |
The read
Sandia's Siberia cluster, one of the Computational Plant (Cplant) machines assembled from commodity Compaq Alpha nodes joined by Myrinet. TOP500 lists 580 EV6 500 MHz cores, 232.6 GFlop/s Rmax and 580 GFlop/s peak, 44th on the November 1999 list and still listed in November 2000, and links the Cplant project page. Sandia's September 2000 release on the successor Antarctica cluster says it was previously ranked 44th with 600 Alpha workstations, describes Myrinet as the interconnect and calls the design a garage-built supercomputer. The release does not give Siberia's own node count, and no site is linked. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, so the tier is reported.
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
- 2026-10-02 Added Cplant Siberia, Sandia's commodity Alpha cluster, 44th on the November 1999 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 |
|---|---|---|
| newsreleases.sandia.gov | names system only | - |
| top500.org | names system only | - |
Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.
Further reading
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.
Operating a supercomputer
Acceptance testing, why "installed" and "in production" are six months apart, and the machine lifecycle.