Supercomputers/Systems/Discovery (ORNL)
USA · planned · mixed
Discovery (ORNL)
Operated by Oak Ridge National Laboratory at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing 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
- -
- Rpeak
- -
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- -
- Cores
- -
- 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 | - HPE Cray Supercomputing GX5000 | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | ornl.gov |
| Accelerator | AMD Instinct MI430X Accelerators AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs | AMD | - | Reported | ornl.gov |
| Storage | Intel DAOS Storage Object store, no POSIX layer underneath · 230 PB on Aurora · About 31 TB/s DAOS-based HPE Cray Supercomputing Storage Systems K3000 | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | ornl.gov |
The read
ORNL's next flagship, announced in October 2025 for delivery in 2028 as an HPE Cray GX5000 with AMD EPYC Venice CPUs and Instinct MI430X GPUs and a DAOS-based HPE storage system. ORNL says only that it will be significantly faster than Frontier, which is not a FLOPS figure. Counts, power and cooling are not published on the page we could fetch, and ORNL is the only source, so the tier is reported.
Timeline
- 2025-10 Announced source
Site & facility
Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility
- Location
- Oak Ridge, TN, USA
- Utility
- Tennessee Valley Authority
- Cooling
- Direct liquid cooling (warm water)
- Commissioned
- 1993
Change history
- 2026-09-20 Added from operator sources
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.
None of the cited sources could be read from our network: the hosts returned bot challenges or did not respond. This check says nothing about the citations either way. See how this check works.
| Cited source | Result | Found on the page |
|---|---|---|
| ornl.gov | could not be fetched | - |
Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.
Related news
- ORNL, AMD and HPE announce Discovery and Lux as Frontier's AI-era successors · Oak Ridge Leadership Computing FacilityLux runs AMD Instinct MI355X on HPE nodes with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure integration and arrives first, in 2026; Discovery follows in 2028 on MI430X and is billed as beating Frontier on every part of the system, not just peak flops. This keeps ORNL's AMD based lineage going a full hardware generation past the MI300A in El Capitan and the MI250X in Frontier.
Further reading
Operating a supercomputer
Acceptance testing, why "installed" and "in production" are six months apart, and the machine lifecycle.
Storage and I/O
Parallel file systems, why checkpointing dominates the write load, and the metadata failure mode nobody expects.
Inside a node
Why accelerators exist, what the memory hierarchy costs, and how the CPU and accelerator merged onto one package.