Supercomputers/Systems/Red Sky
USA · decommissioned · hpc
Red Sky
Also known as Sandia Red Sky
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
- 433.50 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 497.40 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 87.2%
- Cores
- 42,440
- Power
- 4.34 MW
- Per watt
- 0.1 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 | - Sun Blade x6275 | Sun Microsystems | - | Reported | top500.orgsandia.gov |
| CPU | - Xeon X5570 4C 2.93GHz (Nehalem) | Intel | - | Reported | top500.orgsandia.gov |
| Interconnect | - InfiniBand, 3-D torus, all-optical cables | Sun Microsystems | - | Reported | top500.orgsandia.gov |
| Operating system | CentOS Operating systems Linux distribution, RHEL-compatible rebuild · Open source, community-maintained CentOS | The CentOS Project | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
Sandia's Sun Blade x6275 capacity machine, built with Sun Microsystems and Intel and shared with NREL energy research, 14th on the November 2010 TOP500. TOP500 lists 42,440 Xeon X5570 4-core 2.93 GHz cores on InfiniBand at 433.5 TFlop/s Rmax and 497.4 TFlop/s Rpeak, and shows it on every list from June 2010 to June 2017. Sandia's news item independently confirms the Sun and Nehalem hardware, a 3-D torus InfiniBand fabric using only optical cables, 433.5 TFlop/s Linpack and limited use from June 2009 and full production from January 2010. Sandia says its 10th place on the November 2009 list came from temporarily combining Red Sky with an adjacent NREL system, Red Mesa. No retirement date is published in the cited pages, so none is recorded; decommissioned reflects its disappearance from TOP500 after June 2017. TOP500 is the only source for Rpeak, cores and power, so the tier is reported.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque
- Location
- Albuquerque, NM, USA
- Cooling
- Chilled water
- Commissioned
- 1990
Change history
- 2026-10-02 Added Red Sky, Sandia's Sun Blade cluster, 14th on the November 2010 TOP500
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 |
|---|---|---|
| top500.org | names system and part | CentOS |
| sandia.gov | names system only | - |
Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.
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.