Saudi Arabia · operational · hpc

Shaheen II

Operated by KAUST at KAUST Supercomputing Core Lab .

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: 5.54 PFlop/s
Rpeak: 7.24 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 76.5%
Cores: -
Power: 2.83 MW
Per watt: 2.0 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	- Cray XC40	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Verified	hpc.kaust.edu.sa top500.org
CPU	Intel Xeon E5-2698 v3 CPUs x86-64 · 16C · 2.3 GHz · 22 nm · 135 W Xeon E5-2698v3 16C 2.3GHz	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org hpc.kaust.edu.sa
Interconnect	Cray Aries Interconnect Dragonfly · About 10 GB/s per direction · Around 1 microsecond Cray Aries, dragonfly topology	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Verified	hpc.kaust.edu.sa top500.org
Storage	Lustre Storage Parallel filesystem, separate metadata and object servers Sonexion 2000 Lustre, 16 PB usable	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Reported	hpc.kaust.edu.sa
Operating system	Cray Linux Environment Operating systems Linux, Cray-customised · Proprietary layer over open-source Linux Cray Linux Environment	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Reported	top500.org

The read

KAUST's Cray XC40 of dual-socket Haswell nodes on Aries, seventh on the June 2015 TOP500 and the university's flagship until Shaheen III. KAUST's page describes it as active and gives March 2015 as its introduction; TOP500 has kept listing it, most recently well down the list. KAUST counts 197,568 cores (6,174 nodes of 32) where TOP500 counts 196,608, so no core count is recorded and the conflict is logged. TOP500's 2,834 kW is the measured figure; KAUST separately says up to 3.1 MW. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax and Rpeak, so the tier is reported.

Timeline

2015-03 First operational source
2015-06 List debut at #7 (June 2015) source

Public list appearances

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

#7: TOP500, June 2015 →

Site & facility

KAUST Supercomputing Core Lab

Location: Thuwal, Saudi Arabia
Cooling: Direct liquid cooling
Commissioned: 2009

hpc.kaust.edu.sa

Where sources disagree

We record conflicts instead of picking a winner quietly. All open questions.

Core count: 197,568 cores, 6,174 nodes (KAUST) against 196,608 cores (TOP500). No core count is recorded.

Change history

2026-09-20 Added with a rank pointer on the edition where it ranked highest; core count disputed

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
hpc.kaust.edu.sa	names system and part	Cray Aries, Lustre
top500.org	names system and part	Intel Xeon E5-2698 v3, Cray Aries, Cray Linux Environment

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