Supercomputers/Systems/SANAM
Saudi Arabia · operational · hpc
SANAM
Also known as SANAM GPU supercomputer
Operated by KACST at KACST (Riyadh) .
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
- 532.60 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 1.10 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 48.5%
- Cores
- 38,400
- Power
- 179.15 kW
- Per watt
- 3.0 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 | - Adtech system of ASUS ESC4000/FDR G2 servers, 210 nodes | ASUS | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Accelerator | - AMD FirePro S10000 dual-GPU cards, two per node | AMD | - | Verified | top500.orgbackup.arabnews.com |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon E5-2650 8C 2.0GHz, two per node | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond Infiniband FDR | NVIDIA | - | Verified | top500.orgbackup.arabnews.com |
The read
A GPU supercomputer at KACST in Riyadh, built in 2012 by Adtech with ASUS ESC4000/FDR G2 servers: 210 nodes with two Intel Xeon E5-2650 8-core CPUs and two AMD FirePro S10000 dual-GPU cards each, on FDR InfiniBand. TOP500 and Arab News independently place it 52nd on the November 2012 TOP500, which Arab News calls the first in the Middle East; Arab News also says it was second on the Green500. It was a joint KACST, FIAS and Helmholtz FAIR project assembled first at GSI Darmstadt, and TOP500 lists 38,400 cores, Rmax 532.6 and Rpeak 1,098 TFlop/s at 179 kW. It last appeared on the TOP500 in June 2017, which is the basis for the status date; no source states a retirement.
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
Change history
- 2026-10-02 Added SANAM, KACST's FirePro GPU supercomputer, 52nd on the November 2012 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 |
|---|---|---|
| backup.arabnews.com | names system and part | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR |
| top500.org | names system and part | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR |
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.