Magellan ALCF

Also known as Magellan (Argonne)

Operated by Argonne National Laboratory at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility .

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: 38.66 TFlop/s
Rpeak: 43.00 TFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 89.9%
Cores: 4,032
Power: 132 kW
Per watt: 0.3 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, 504 dual-socket compute servers	IBM IBMNYSE	504 reported	Reported	top500.org science.osti.gov
Accelerator	- 266 Nvidia 2070 GPU cards in 133 GPU servers	NVIDIA NVDANASDAQ	266 reported	Reported	science.osti.gov
CPU	- Intel Nehalem dual quad-core 2.66 GHz (Xeon X5550 per TOP500), 2 per server	Intel INTCNASDAQ	1,008 estimated	Reported	top500.org science.osti.gov
Interconnect	Mellanox InfiniBand QDR Interconnect Fat tree · 40 Gb/s per 4x port QDR InfiniBand	Mellanox NVDANASDAQ rolls up to NVIDIA	-	Reported	top500.org science.osti.gov

The read

Argonne half of the DOE Magellan cloud testbed, built to test whether private clouds suit mid-range DOE science workloads; the NERSC half is magellan-nersc. The March 2011 ASCAC status slides describe 504 IBM iDataPlex servers (dual quad-core 2.66 GHz Nehalem, 24 GB RAM, QDR InfiniBand), 4,032 cores and about 40 TF peak, plus 200 active-storage nodes with 40 TB of SSD, 15 big-memory servers and 133 GPU servers carrying 266 Nvidia 2070 cards. Timeline in the slides: core system deployed Jan-Feb 2010, acceptance Feb 2010, cloud user access Mar 2010, Nimbus in Jun 2010, OpenStack in Dec 2010, and the Magellan cloud projects scheduled to end Sep 2011; the project was funded under ARRA. The TOP500 entry covers only the 4,032 compute cores (the same count as the 504 servers): Rmax 38.66 TF at rank 286 in Nov 2010 (31.31 TF, rank 292, in Jun 2010) against 43.0 TF Rpeak, versus the slides' rounded 40 TF peak. The GPU, active-storage and big-memory servers are not in the Linpack figure.

Timeline

2010-03 First operational source
2010-11 List debut at #286 (November 2010) source

Public list appearances

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

#286: TOP500, November 2010 →

Site & facility

Argonne Leadership Computing Facility

Location: Lemont, IL, USA
Cooling: Direct liquid cooling (warm water)
Commissioned: 2006

alcf.anl.gov anl.gov

Change history

2026-10-17 Magellan ALCF 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
science.osti.gov	does not name this system	-
top500.org	names system and part	Mellanox InfiniBand QDR

Checked 2026-10-18 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.