USA · operational · hpc

NOAA Mars

Also known as Mars

Operated by NOAA .

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: 1.12 PFlop/s
Rpeak: 1.40 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 80.2%
Cores: 33,600
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	- Dell EMC PowerEdge C6320 (Dell EMC / IBM-GBS)	Dell Technologies DELLNYSE	-	Reported	top500.org nextplatform.com
CPU	- Intel Xeon E5-2690v4 14C 2.6GHz	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org nextplatform.com
Interconnect	Mellanox InfiniBand EDR Interconnect Fat tree · 100 Gb/s per 4x port · About 0.9 microseconds Infiniband EDR (100 Gb/s Mellanox)	Mellanox NVDANASDAQ rolls up to NVIDIA	-	Reported	top500.org nextplatform.com
Operating system	Red Hat Enterprise Linux Operating systems Linux distribution · Open source, commercial support subscription RHEL 7.2	Red Hat IBMNYSE rolls up to IBM	-	Reported	top500.org

The read

One of two Dell PowerEdge C6320 clusters NOAA added to its operational weather computing around the turn of 2018 (the other is Venus, noaa-venus), listed by TOP500 under the manufacturer 'Dell EMC / IBM-GBS'. Next Platform describes 1,212 nodes per cluster with two 14-core 2.6 GHz Broadwell Xeons each (33,936 cores), 100 Gb/s Mellanox EDR InfiniBand, a dedicated 5.9 PB GPFS file system per machine, sites in Reston, Virginia and Orlando, Florida, and operation at NCEP expected by the end of January 2018. TOP500 lists 33,600 cores, 1.121 PFlop/s Rmax, 1.398 PFlop/s Rpeak and an installation year of 2017 and already had the pair on its November 2017 list, so the go-live date is left blank. Next Platform quotes 2.8 PFlop/s peak per cluster while Scientific Computing says the upgrade adds 2.8 PFlop/s across both sites, which matches two clusters at TOP500's 1.4 PFlop/s each; TOP500's figure is recorded. Listed from November 2017 (rank 133) to June 2019 (rank 440). Tier is reported.

Timeline

2018-06 List debut at #208 (June 2018) source

Public list appearances

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

#208: TOP500, June 2018 →

Change history

2026-10-17 NOAA Mars 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
nextplatform.com	names system and part	Mellanox InfiniBand EDR
top500.org	names system and part	Mellanox InfiniBand EDR

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

NOAA Mars

Measured performance

What this machine is made of

The read

Timeline

Public list appearances

Change history

Source check

Further reading

Operating a supercomputer

Inside a node

The interconnect