Supercomputers/Systems/Magellan NERSC
USA · operational · hpc
Magellan NERSC
Also known as Magellan (NERSC)
Operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory .
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
- 29.20 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 31.82 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 91.8%
- Cores
- 2,984
- Power
- 97 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, 720 dual-socket compute servers | IBM | 720 reported | Reported | top500.orgscience.osti.gov |
| CPU | - Intel Nehalem dual quad-core 2.66 GHz (Xeon X5550 per TOP500), 2 per server | Intel | 1,440 estimated | Reported | top500.orgscience.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.orgscience.osti.gov |
The read
NERSC half of the DOE Magellan cloud testbed; the Argonne half is magellan-alcf. The March 2011 ASCAC status slides give 720 IBM iDataPlex servers (dual quad-core 2.66 GHz Nehalem, 24 GB RAM), 5,760 cores and about 40 TF peak on QDR InfiniBand, with 1 PB of GPFS global storage, 10 flash-storage nodes (8 TB flash, 20 GB/s) and 2 big-memory servers totalling 2 TB. Timeline: deployment Dec 2009-Jan 2010, cluster user access Apr 2010, acceptance May 2010, cloud user access Oct 2010, cloud research projects scheduled to end Sep 2011. The single TOP500 appearance (Jun 2010, rank 362) lists 2,984 cores, Rmax 29.20 TF, Rpeak 31.82 TF and 97 kW, so the Linpack entry does not cover all 5,760 cores the slides describe. No site is recorded because the fetched pages do not state which NERSC building housed it.
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 Magellan NERSC 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.
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.