USA · operational · hpc

Kay (ARL)

Also known as ARL DSRC Liqid composable cluster Kay

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: 2.48 PFlop/s
Rpeak: 3.45 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 71.9%
Cores: 46,848
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	- Liqid composable infrastructure cluster	Liqid	-	Reported	top500.org nextgov.com
CPU	- Intel Xeon Platinum 9242 48C 2.3GHz	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org nextgov.com
Interconnect	NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR Interconnect Fat tree or dragonfly+ · 200 Gb/s per port · About 0.6 microseconds InfiniBand HDR	NVIDIA NVDANASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org nextgov.com

The read

Liqid composable supercomputer at the Army Research Laboratory DoD Supercomputing Resource Center, the sibling of Jean and named for ENIAC programmer Kay McNulty. Nextgov reported the acquisition of Jean and Kay on 30 December 2020, built on Liqid platforms with 48-core Intel Xeon processors and the largest solid-state file systems the DoD had deployed, with production expected around mid fiscal 2021. TOP500 lists Kay as a Liqid cluster of Intel Xeon Platinum 9242 48C 2.3GHz CPUs on InfiniBand HDR running CentOS, 46,848 cores, Rmax 2.48 PFlop/s and Rpeak 3.45 PFlop/s; it first appeared 200th on the June 2021 list and was last listed 496th in June 2025. Neither source gives Kay-specific node counts, so the tier is reported.

Timeline

2020 First operational source
2020-12 Announced source
2021-06 List debut at #200 (June 2021) source

Public list appearances

Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.

#200: TOP500, June 2021 →

Change history

2026-10-09 Added Kay (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.

Every source cited on this page was readable, and none of them mentions this system. They are cited at page granularity, normally because no stable deep link could be found. That is a real weakness in this row and it is why the system carries a confidence tier below verified. See how this check works.

Cited source	Result	Found on the page
nextgov.com	does not name this system	-
top500.org	does not name this system	NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR

Checked 2026-10-13 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.