Supercomputers/Systems/Frontera
USA · operational · hpc
Frontera
Operated by Texas Advanced Computing Center at Texas Advanced Computing Center .
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: 32 of 52 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 4 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
- 23.52 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 38.75 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 60.7%
- Cores
- 448,448
- 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 | - Dell PowerEdge C6420 | Dell Technologies | - | Reported | tacc.utexas.edutacc.utexas.edu |
| CPU | Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 CPUs Xeon Platinum 8280 28C 2.7GHz | Intel | - | Reported | tacc.utexas.edutacc.utexas.edu |
| Interconnect | NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR Interconnect Mellanox HDR Infiniband | NVIDIA | - | Reported | tacc.utexas.edutacc.utexas.edu |
| Operating system | Red Hat Enterprise Linux Operating systems Red Hat Enterprise Linux | Red Hat | - | Reported | tacc.utexas.edutacc.utexas.edu |
The read
The largest academic system in the United States at its debut, built from Dell PowerEdge nodes on Mellanox HDR InfiniBand. Its supply chain is entirely merchant - no custom silicon, no proprietary fabric - which is what makes it a good baseline against the national-laboratory machines that surround it in these tables.
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
Texas Advanced Computing Center
- Location
- Austin, TX, USA
- Cooling
- Direct liquid cooling
- Commissioned
- 2007
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 |
|---|---|---|
| tacc.utexas.edu | names system only | - |
| tacc.utexas.edu | names system and part | Intel Xeon Platinum 8280, NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR |
Checked 2026-09-08 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.
Operating a supercomputer
Acceptance testing, why "installed" and "in production" are six months apart, and the machine lifecycle.
The interconnect
Topologies, why latency and tail behaviour matter more than bandwidth, and how the fabric market consolidated.