Lightning (AFRL)

Also known as AFRL DSRC Cray XC30 Lightning

Operated by AFRL DSRC at AFRL DSRC (Wright-Patterson AFB) .

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: 957.60 TFlop/s
Rpeak: 1.21 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 79.0%
Cores: 56,112
Power: 1.57 MW
Per watt: 0.6 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 XC30	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Reported	top500.org web.archive.org
Accelerator	- NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPUs, 32 accelerated nodes per AFRL page	NVIDIA NVDANASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org web.archive.org
CPU	Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2 CPUs x86-64 · 12C · 2.7 GHz · 22 nm · 130 W Intel Xeon E5-2697v2 12C 2.7GHz, 24 cores per node	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org web.archive.org
Interconnect	Cray Aries Interconnect Dragonfly · About 10 GB/s per direction · Around 1 microsecond Cray Aries interconnect	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Reported	top500.org web.archive.org
Operating system	Cray Linux Environment Operating systems Linux, Cray-customised · Proprietary layer over open-source Linux Cray Linux Environment	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Reported	top500.org web.archive.org

The read

Cray XC30 at the Air Force Research Laboratory DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (AFRL DSRC) at Wright-Patterson AFB, part of the DoD HPCMP. TOP500 lists Intel Xeon E5-2697v2 12C 2.7GHz processors on the Aries interconnect running Cray Linux Environment, 56,112 cores, Rmax 957.60 TFlop/s, Rpeak 1,212.02 TFlop/s and 1,571.14 kW; it first appeared 56th on the November 2014 list and was last listed 450th in November 2018. An AFRL DSRC hardware page captured by the Internet Archive in 2015 describes Lightning as a Cray XC30 rated at 1.2 PFLOPS with 2,370 compute nodes (24-core Xeon E5-2697v2 at 2.7 GHz plus 32 GPU-accelerated nodes with NVIDIA Tesla K40) on Cray Aries and SUSE Linux CLE; the 1.2 PFLOPS peak agrees across the two independent sources. The name Lightning also belongs to an unrelated LANL machine already in the register.

Timeline

2014 First operational source
2014-11 List debut at #56 (November 2014) source

Public list appearances

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

#56: TOP500, November 2014 →

Site & facility

AFRL DSRC (Wright-Patterson AFB)

Location: Wright-Patterson AFB, OH, USA

afresearchlab.com spacemart.com

Change history

2026-10-09 Added Lightning (AFRL)

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 E5-2697 v2, Cray Aries, Cray Linux Environment
top500.org	names system and part	Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2, Cray Aries, Cray Linux Environment

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