Supercomputers/Systems/Hercules (ARL)
USA · operational · hpc
Hercules (ARL)
Also known as ARL DSRC IBM iDataPlex Hercules
Operated by ARL DSRC .
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: 1263 of 1345 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 56 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
- 303.96 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 363.42 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 83.6%
- Cores
- 17,472
- Power
- 347.26 kW
- Per watt
- 0.9 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 | - IBM iDataPlex DX360M4 cluster | IBM | - | Reported | top500.orgweb.archive.org |
| CPU | Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPUs x86-64 · 8C · 2.6 GHz · 32 nm · 115 W Intel Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.6GHz, 1,092 compute nodes of 16 cores | Intel | - | Reported | top500.orgweb.archive.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond InfiniBand FDR (ARL page says FDR-10) | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.orgweb.archive.org |
| Operating system | Red Hat Enterprise Linux Operating systems Linux distribution · Open source, commercial support subscription Red Hat Enterprise Linux | Red Hat | - | Reported | top500.orgweb.archive.org |
The read
IBM iDataPlex DX360M4 cluster at the Army Research Laboratory DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (ARL DSRC) at Aberdeen Proving Ground, part of the DoD HPCMP. TOP500 lists Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.6GHz processors on InfiniBand FDR running Linux, 17,472 cores, Rmax 303.96 TFlop/s, Rpeak 363.42 TFlop/s and 347.26 kW; it first appeared 81st on the November 2012 list and was last listed 461st in June 2016. An ARL DSRC hardware page captured by the Internet Archive in 2015 describes Hercules as an IBM iDataPlex rated at 360 TFLOPS with 1,092 compute nodes of 16 Sandy Bridge E5-2670 cores at 2.6 GHz (17,472 cores) on FDR-10 InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet under Red Hat Enterprise Linux; core count and peak agree across the two independent sources. Named Hercules (ARL) to distinguish it from the Mississippi State machine of the same name.
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 Hercules (ARL)
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 |
|---|---|---|
| web.archive.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon E5-2670, Mellanox InfiniBand FDR |
| top500.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon E5-2670, Mellanox InfiniBand FDR |
Checked 2026-10-13 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.