Supercomputers/Systems/Amber
USA · operational · hpc
Amber
Also known as SNL/NNSA CTS-2 Amber
Operated by Sandia National Laboratories .
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
- 9.51 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 10.84 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 87.7%
- Cores
- 169,344
- 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 | - Dell PowerEdge C6620 and R760 servers (TOP500 label PowerEdge C6220), CTS-2 | Dell Technologies | - | Reported | top500.orgllnl.gov |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon Platinum 8480+ 56C 2GHz (4th Gen Xeon Scalable) | Intel | - | Reported | top500.orgllnl.gov |
| Interconnect | Omni-Path Architecture Interconnect Fat tree · 100 Gb/s per port · About 1 microsecond Cornelis Networks Omni-Path | Cornelis Networks | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Operating system | Tri-Lab Operating System Stack Operating systems Linux distribution, RHEL-derived, HPC-tuned · Open source, LLNL-maintained Linux/TOSS | Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
Sandia's second CTS-2 commodity cluster, sibling of Stout, for the NNSA simulation workload. TOP500 lists Dell PowerEdge servers with Xeon Platinum 8480+ 56C 2GHz hosts on Cornelis Networks Omni-Path under Linux/TOSS, installed 2022 per TOP500, with 169,344 cores, Rmax 9.51 PFlop/s and Rpeak 10.84 PFlop/s; it debuted at rank 98 on the June 2024 list and was 196th in June 2026. Livermore's November 2023 article names Amber as the fourth CTS-2 system and says the CTS-2 scalable units use Dell PowerEdge C6620 and R760 servers with 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, but it gives no Amber-specific figures, so the tier is reported. The campus is not stated, so the site is left blank.
Timeline
- 2024-06 List debut at #98 (June 2024) source
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Change history
- 2026-10-07 Added Amber (sandia)
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 | Omni-Path Architecture |
| llnl.gov | names system and part | Omni-Path Architecture, Tri-Lab Operating System Stack |
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.