Supercomputers/Systems/Discovery 5
USA · operational · hpc
Discovery 5
Operated by ExxonMobil at ExxonMobil (undisclosed US site) .
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
- 26.13 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 30.99 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 84.3%
- Cores
- 232,000
- Power
- 964 kW
- Per watt
- 27.1 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 | - HPE Cray EX235n | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Verified | top500.orgdrillingcontractor.org |
| Accelerator | NVIDIA A100 SXM4 40GB Accelerators CUDA (Ampere GA100) · 6,912C · 1.41 GHz · 7 nm · 400 W NVIDIA A100 SXM4 40GB | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | - AMD EPYC 7543 32C 2.8GHz | AMD | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | HPE Slingshot-11 Interconnect Dragonfly · 200 Gb/s per port · Around 2 microseconds HPE Slingshot-11 | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Operating system | HPE Cray Operating System Operating systems SUSE-derived Linux, container-based management · Proprietary layer over open-source Linux HPE Cray OS | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
ExxonMobil's HPE Cray EX235n predecessor to Discovery 6 (already in this dataset), built around AMD EPYC 7543 32-core CPUs paired with NVIDIA A100 SXM4 40 GB GPUs on HPE Slingshot-11 interconnect, running HPE Cray OS. TOP500 lists Rmax 26.13 PFlop/s, Rpeak 30.99 PFlop/s, 232,000 cores and 964 kW of power, first appearing on the November 2022 list at rank 16. Multiple outlets covering the March 2025 Discovery 6 launch, including Drilling Contractor, HPCwire and Data Center Dynamics, independently confirm Discovery 5 as the named predecessor system that Discovery 6 replaces with four times the computational performance, though none of them republish TOP500's specific petaflops figures, so the tier is reported rather than verified. Still tracked on TOP500 as of the June 2026 list at rank 82, at the same undisclosed US ExxonMobil site as Discovery 6.
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
- 2026-09-27 Discovery 5 added, ExxonMobil's HPE Cray EX235n predecessor to Discovery 6
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 |
|---|---|---|
| drillingcontractor.org | names system and part | HPE Cray Operating System |
| top500.org | names system and part | NVIDIA A100 SXM4 40GB, HPE Slingshot-11, HPE Cray Operating System |
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.