USA · operational · hpc

NOAA Venus

Also known as Venus

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

The twin of Mars (noaa-mars): a Dell PowerEdge C6320 cluster of 14-core Xeon E5-2690v4 processors on EDR InfiniBand running RHEL 7.2 per TOP500, one of the two machines that brought NOAA's operational capacity to 8.4 PFlop/s (4.2 PFlop/s per site) according to Scientific Computing. TOP500 gives Venus identical figures to Mars (33,600 cores, 1.121 PFlop/s Rmax, 1.398 PFlop/s Rpeak, no power) and ranks it one place higher on every list from November 2017 (rank 132) to June 2019 (rank 439). Scientific Computing places the Dell systems in the Reston, Virginia and Orlando, Florida data centers without saying which is which, and it does not name Mars or Venus, so no site is recorded. Next Platform reports 1,212 nodes and 33,936 cores per cluster, 56 GB of memory per node and a 5.9 PB GPFS file system; the 33,936 against 33,600 core difference is left unreconciled. Tier is reported.

Timeline

2017-11 List debut at #132 (November 2017) source

Public list appearances

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

#132: TOP500, November 2017 →

Change history

2026-10-17 NOAA Venus 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 Venus

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