Supercomputers/Systems/Hera
USA · operational · hpc
Hera
Also known as NOAA RDHPCS Hera
Operated by NOAA at NOAA NESCC (Fairmont) .
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
- 3.08 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 4.88 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 63.1%
- Cores
- 63,840
- 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 | - Cray CS500 (HPE/Cray) | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Verified | top500.orgnoaa.gov |
| Integrator | - GDIT procures, installs and manages the system | GDIT | - | Reported | gdit.com |
| CPU | Intel Xeon Gold 6148 CPUs x86-64 · 20C · 2.4 GHz · 14 nm · 150 W Xeon Gold 6148 20C 2.4GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR Interconnect Fat tree or dragonfly+ · 200 Gb/s per port · About 0.6 microseconds Infiniband HDR | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Operating system | CentOS Operating systems Linux distribution, RHEL-compatible rebuild · Open source, community-maintained CentOS | The CentOS Project | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
NOAA's Research and Development HPC system at the NOAA Environmental Security Computing Center in Fairmont, West Virginia, used for weather, ocean and climate modelling research. TOP500 lists it as an HPE/Cray CS500 with Intel Xeon Gold 6148 20C 2.4GHz processors over InfiniBand HDR running CentOS, 63,840 cores, Rmax 3.08 PFlop/s and Rpeak 4.88 PFlop/s; it ranked 88th on the June 2020 list and was still 416th in November 2025. NOAA's own Hera page independently gives the same 63,840 cores and a Cray build, and adds an 18.5 PB Lustre file system and an experimental fine-grain GPU partition. GDIT's release says it procured, installed and manages the upgraded system, completed on July 15, 2020, at about 3.3 petaflops peak. TOP500 dates the installation to 2019 while GDIT dates the completed upgrade to 2020, so the first-operational year is the earlier TOP500 one.
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
Change history
- 2026-10-02 Added Hera
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, NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR, CentOS |
| noaa.gov | names system only | - |
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.