Supercomputers/Systems/Ice Storm
USA · operational · hpc
Ice Storm
Also known as INL SGI Altix ICE 8200
Operated by INL .
Researched with AI assistance, checked by scripts. These rows were researched by AI agents reading public operator, laboratory and vendor sources, appended by scripts and checked by automated validation; no subject-matter expert has reviewed them (how this site is made). A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1350 of 1540 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 64 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
- 17.09 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 21.79 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 78.4%
- Cores
- 2,048
- 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 | - SGI Altix ICE 8200 | SGI HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.orghpcchallenge.org |
| CPU | - Intel quad-core Xeon X5355 2.66 GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.orghpcchallenge.org |
| Operating system | SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Operating systems Linux distribution · Open source, commercial support subscription SLES10 + SGI ProPack 5 | SUSE | - | Reported | top500.orghpcchallenge.org |
The read
SGI Altix ICE 8200 at Idaho National Laboratory, listed by TOP500 as Ice Storm. TOP500 shows 2,048 cores of quad-core 2.66 GHz Xeon X5355 on InfiniBand under SLES 10 with SGI ProPack 5, Nmax 703,872, ranked 64th in November 2007 (17.09 TFlop/s Rmax), 117th in June 2008, 247th in November 2008 and 472nd in June 2009 (17.78 TFlop/s, its last list), with a 21.79 TFlop/s peak throughout. The HPC Challenge record for INL at Idaho Falls independently lists an Altix ICE 8200 with 512 quad-core Xeon 2.66 GHz sockets (2,048 HPL processes), 4,096 GiB of memory, SGI InfiniBand and SLES 10, with a 15.70 TFlop/s HPL result against the same 21.79 peak; that record calls it only Altix ICE 8200, so the name Ice Storm rests on the TOP500 entry alone. INL's later Sawtooth system sits under the same operator in the dataset.
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
- 2026-10-17 Ice Storm added from its source pages
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 |
|---|---|---|
| hpcchallenge.org | does not name this system | - |
| top500.org | names system only | - |
Checked 2026-10-18 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.
Programming a supercomputer
The software stack beneath the application, and why the OS is now a sovereignty signal as much as a technical choice.