Supercomputers/Systems/FROSTBURG
USA · operational · classified
FROSTBURG
Also known as NSA Connection Machine CM-5/512
Operated by National Security Agency .
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
- 30.4 GFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 65.5 GFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 46.4%
- Cores
- 512
- 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 | - Thinking Machines CM-5/512 | Thinking Machines | - | Reported | top500.orgen.wikipedia.org |
| CPU | Thinking Machines CM-5 vector node CPUs SPARC + custom vector · 1C · 0.032 GHz Thinking Machines CM-5 nodes (SuperSPARC 32 MHz with vector units), 512 nodes | Thinking Machines | 512 reported | Reported | top500.orgen.wikipedia.org |
| Interconnect | - Hypercube, tree | Thinking Machines | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Operating system | Thinking Machines CMost Operating systems Unix (TMC-proprietary variant) · Proprietary CMost | Thinking Machines | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
Thinking Machines CM-5 with 512 SuperSPARC 32 MHz nodes (hypercube and tree networks, CMost), listed by TOP500 under the National Security Agency from June 1993 (rank 4) to June 1997 (rank 83), Rmax 30.4 and Rpeak 65.54 GFlop/s in every appearance, the same figures as the NCSA CM-5/512 (https://www.top500.org/system/167058/). Wikipedia's FROSTBURG article describes an NSA CM-5 of 512 nodes (originally 256, expanded in 1993 with another 256), installed in 1991 and operated until 1997, with a stated theoretical peak of 65.5 GFlop/s, and says it now stands in the National Cryptologic Museum; DCist (July 2011) calls Frostburg the first massively parallel supercomputer the NSA ever bought. The identification of the TOP500 entry with FROSTBURG is an inference from the matching 512-node size, the 1993 doubling and the 1997 end of use; the installation year of 1991 and the cost come only from Wikipedia and are not used here. The start date is therefore the 1993 TOP500 installation year of the 512-node configuration. What the machine was used for is not documented beyond the general phrase mathematical calculations, so it is classed as classified. Another CM-5/512 is ncsa-cm5-512 and the largest CM-5 is cm-5.
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
- 2026-10-18 Added FROSTBURG (nsa)
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.