Supercomputers/Systems/Explorer-WUS3
USA · operational · mixed
Explorer-WUS3
Operated by Microsoft at Microsoft Azure (undisclosed US region) .
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
- 53.96 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 86.99 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 62.0%
- Cores
- 445,440
- 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 | - Microsoft Azure ND96_amsr_MI200_v4 | Microsoft | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Accelerator | AMD Instinct MI250X Accelerators ROCm (CDNA 2) · 1.7 GHz · TSMC N6 · 560 W AMD Instinct MI250X | AMD | - | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | AMD EPYC 7V12 CPUs x86-64 · 48C · 2.45 GHz · 7 nm AMD EPYC 7V12 48C 2.45GHz | AMD | - | Verified | top500.orglearn.microsoft.com |
| Interconnect | NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR Interconnect Fat tree or dragonfly+ · 200 Gb/s per port · About 0.6 microseconds Infiniband HDR | NVIDIA | - | Verified | top500.orglearn.microsoft.com |
| Operating system | Ubuntu Server Operating systems Linux distribution · Open source, free with paid support tiers Ubuntu 20.04 | Canonical | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
An Azure ND-series MI250X cluster (the naming suggests the West US 3 region, but no independent Microsoft statement ties this specific TOP500 entry to that region, so it stays on the same undisclosed-site convention already used for Eagle). First listed in June 2023 at rank 11; power draw is not disclosed on TOP500's own page, not merely omitted from this row.
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
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 | AMD EPYC 7V12, AMD Instinct MI250X, NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR, Ubuntu Server |
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.
Programming a supercomputer
The software stack beneath the application, and why the OS is now a sovereignty signal as much as a technical choice.