Saudi Arabia · operational · mixed

Shaheen III

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: 35.66 PFlop/s
Rpeak: 39.61 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 90.0%
Cores: 877,824
Power: 5.30 MW
Per watt: 6.7 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	- HPE Cray EX235a	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Reported	hpc.kaust.edu.sa kaust.edu.sa
CPU	AMD EPYC 9004 (Genoa) CPUs x86-64 · 96C · 2.4 GHz · TSMC N5 · 360 W AMD EPYC 9654 96C 2.4GHz	AMD AMDNASDAQ	-	Reported	hpc.kaust.edu.sa kaust.edu.sa
Interconnect	HPE Slingshot-11 Interconnect Dragonfly · 200 Gb/s per port · Around 2 microseconds Slingshot-11	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Reported	hpc.kaust.edu.sa kaust.edu.sa
Storage	HPE Cray ClusterStor E1000 Storage Lustre appliance, flash and disk tiers · 700 PB on Frontier (Orion) · About 10 TB/s peak Lustre on ClusterStor	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Reported	hpc.kaust.edu.sa kaust.edu.sa
Cooling	Direct liquid cooling, warm water Cooling Direct-to-chip cold plates, facility water loop · Removes 90+ percent of node heat to liquid HPE Cray EX cabinet: 100% direct liquid cooled	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Reported	hpc.kaust.edu.sa kaust.edu.sa
Operating system	HPE Cray Operating System Operating systems SUSE-derived Linux, container-based management · Proprietary layer over open-source Linux HPE Cray Operating System	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Reported	hpc.kaust.edu.sa kaust.edu.sa

The read

The only system in this dataset outside North America, Europe and East Asia, which is itself the finding: sovereign compute programmes are concentrated in a small number of places, and a directory that only covers the top of a ranking makes that concentration invisible by treating it as the whole world. This row is the CPU partition; a later, separate GPU partition with its own HPL submission carries its own row, shaheen-iii-gpu, matching the split TOP500 itself uses for the same physical KAUST installation.

Timeline

2022 Announced source
2023-11 List debut at #82 (November 2023) source
2023-11 First operational source

Public list appearances

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

Site & facility

KAUST Supercomputing Core Lab

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

hpc.kaust.edu.sa

Change history

2026-09-22 Gained a Green500 rank pointer (#82 on the 2023-11 list)

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	AMD EPYC 9004 (Genoa), HPE Slingshot-11, HPE Cray Operating System, HPE Cray ClusterStor E1000
kaust.edu.sa	names system and part	HPE Cray Operating System, Direct liquid cooling, warm water, HPE Cray ClusterStor E1000

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