Supercomputers/Systems/Electra
USA · operational · hpc
Electra
Also known as NASA Electra; NAS Electra
Operated by NASA at NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility .
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: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 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
- 5.44 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 8.32 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 65.4%
- Cores
- 124,416
- Power
- 1.69 MW
- Per watt
- 3.2 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 | - HPE SGI 8600 / SGI ICE-X modular system | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.orgnas.nasa.gov |
| CPU | Intel Xeon Gold 6148 CPUs x86-64 · 20C · 2.4 GHz · 14 nm · 150 W 2,232 Skylake nodes with dual 20-core Xeon Gold 6148 at 2.4 GHz | Intel | 2,232 reported | Verified | top500.orgnas.nasa.gov |
| CPU | Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 CPUs x86-64 · 14C · 2.4 GHz · 14 nm · 120 W 1,152 Broadwell nodes with dual 14-core Xeon E5-2680v4 at 2.4 GHz | Intel | 1,152 reported | Reported | nas.nasa.gov |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand EDR Interconnect Fat tree · 100 Gb/s per 4x port · About 0.9 microseconds InfiniBand EDR and FDR fabrics (EDR/FDR-56 IB) | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.orgnas.nasa.gov |
The read
NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division's prototype modular system, built in 2016 and expanded in 2017 and 2018 into an HPE SGI 8600 of 32 racks and 3,384 nodes: 2,232 Skylake nodes with dual Xeon Gold 6148 plus 1,152 Broadwell nodes with dual Xeon E5-2680v4, on InfiniBand FDR and EDR. NAS quotes 8.10 PFlop/s peak and 5.44 PFlop/s Linpack; TOP500 lists 124,416 cores, Rpeak 8.32 PFlop/s and 1,686 kW. TOP500 reports it still listed in June 2026.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility
- Location
- Moffett Field, CA, USA
- Cooling
- Air and liquid hybrid
- Commissioned
- 1987
Change history
- 2026-10-02 Added Electra, NASA's modular HPE SGI 8600, 46th on the June 2020 TOP500
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 |
|---|---|---|
| top500.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon Gold 6148, Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4, Mellanox InfiniBand EDR |
| nas.nasa.gov | names system, part and count | Intel Xeon Gold 6148, Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4, Mellanox InfiniBand EDR · counts: 2232, 1152 |
Checked 2026-10-09 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.