Intel Paragon XP/S 140

Also known as XP/S 140

Operated by Sandia National Laboratories at Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque .

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: 143.4 GFlop/s
Rpeak: -
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: -
Cores: 3,680
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	- Intel Paragon XP/S 140	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Verified	netlib.org osti.gov
CPU	Intel i860/XP CPUs i860 RISC · 1C · 0.05 GHz · 1000 nm Intel i860/XP	Intel INTCNASDAQ	3,680 reported	Verified	netlib.org osti.gov
Interconnect	Intel Paragon 2D mesh Interconnect 2D mesh with torus wraparound · 200 MB/s per link Paragon XP/S 2-D mesh	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Verified	netlib.org osti.gov
Storage	Paragon I/O node RAID storage Storage Direct-attached RAID behind dedicated I/O nodes, diskless compute nodes reliable cost-effective mass storage via arrays of commodity 3.5-in disks protected by hardware RAID	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	archive.org
Cooling	Air cooling (CRAC/CRAH) Cooling Room-level air handling · Practical ceiling around 15-20 kW per rack Air-cooled operation	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	archive.org
Operating system	SUNMOS Operating systems Custom lightweight kernel, no Unix layer · Open source, government-authored SUNMOS	Sandia National Laboratories	-	Verified	osti.gov netlib.org

The read

The first massively parallel machine to take the top of the list outright, and the moment the vector era stopped being the default answer. It is also the clearest early example of an operator supplying part of its own stack: Intel’s OSF/1 would not scale, so Sandia and the University of New Mexico wrote SUNMOS, a kernel under 256KB, and ran the machine on it. SUNMOS became PUMA, PUMA became Cougar, and Cougar ran ASCI Red on this same site three years later, which is a supply-chain lineage that no spec string records. No public source gives a decommissioning date, so the field is empty rather than guessed.

Timeline

1993 First operational source
1994-06 List debut at #1 (June 1994) source

Public list appearances

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

#1: TOP500, June 1994 →

Site & facility

Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque

Location: Albuquerque, NM, USA
Cooling: Chilled water
Commissioned: 1990

sandia.gov

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
netlib.org	names system and part	Intel i860/XP, Intel Paragon 2D mesh, SUNMOS, Paragon I/O node RAID storage
osti.gov	could not be fetched	-

Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.