Supercomputers/Systems/Franklin
USA · decommissioned · hpc
Franklin
Also known as NERSC Cray XT4
Operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory .
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
- 266.30 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 355.51 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 74.9%
- Cores
- 38,642
- Power
- 1.15 MW
- Per watt
- 0.2 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 | - Cray XT4 | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | - Opteron Quad Core 2.3GHz | AMD | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | - XT4 Internal Interconnect | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Operating system | - CNL (Compute Node Linux) | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.orgcs-newsarchive.lbl.gov |
The read
NERSC's Cray XT4, eighth on the November 2008 TOP500 with 38,642 Opteron quad-core 2.3 GHz cores. Berkeley Lab's news item says it retired in 2012 after about five years, delivered 1.18 billion processor hours, and was the first Cray system to fully implement the Cray Linux Environment; the 2008 date here is the install year of the TOP500 entry. Site left blank because the dataset's only NERSC site is the later Shyh Wang Hall building. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, Rpeak and power, so the tier is reported.
Timeline
- 2008 First operational source
- 2008-11 List debut at #8 (November 2008) source
- 2012 Decommissioned source
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 Franklin, the NERSC Cray XT4, eighth on the November 2008 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 |
|---|---|---|
| cs-newsarchive.lbl.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
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.