Supercomputers/Systems/Faris
Saudi Arabia · operational · hpc
Faris
Also known as Saudi Aramco Faris; EXPEC Faris
Operated by Saudi Aramco .
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
- 816.58 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 917.50 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 89.0%
- Cores
- 40,960
- Power
- 707 kW
- Per watt
- 1.2 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 Cluster Platform SL230s Gen8 (ProLiant SL230s) cluster | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.orgarabnews.com |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon E5-2680v2 10C 2.8GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR Interconnect Fat tree · 40 Gb/s per 4x port InfiniBand QDR interconnect | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
Saudi Aramco seismic and reservoir simulation cluster of the Exploration and Petroleum Engineering Center (EXPEC). TOP500 lists an HPE Cluster Platform SL230s Gen8 with Intel Xeon E5-2680v2 10C 2.8GHz on InfiniBand QDR, 40,960 cores, Rmax 816.58 and Rpeak 917.50 TFlop/s and 707 kW, installed in 2014 and ranked 46th in June 2014; its last TOP500 entry is June 2018 at rank 407. Arab News (September 2015) names Faris among Aramco's EXPEC machines, with more than 40,960 processors (cores) and a Linpack result of about 816 trillion operations per second (the article writes billions). The June 2018 list is the last evidence found, so the status date is that list. It is distinct from the later Makman-2, Makman-3 and Ghawar-1 machines already in the register.
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
- 2026-10-09 Added Faris at Saudi Aramco
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 QDR |
| arabnews.com | could not be fetched | - |
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.