USA · decommissioned · hpc

Theta

Operated by Argonne National Laboratory at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility .

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: 5.88 PFlop/s
Rpeak: 9.63 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 61.1%
Cores: 231,424
Power: 1.09 MW
Per watt: 5.4 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	-	Reported	top500.org web.archive.org
Interconnect	Cray Aries Interconnect Dragonfly · About 10 GB/s per direction · Around 1 microsecond Cray Aries interconnect, three-tier dragonfly	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Reported	cug.org
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

Argonne's Cray XC40 of Xeon Phi 7230 nodes, sixteenth on the June 2017 TOP500 at 231,424 cores, retired at the end of 2023 according to ALCF and Argonne, which are one organization and reachable here only through archived copies. TOP500 kept listing it until 2025. The later ThetaGPU expansion is not recorded. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, Rpeak and core count, so the tier is reported.

Timeline

2017-06 List debut at #16 (June 2017) source
2017-07 First operational source
2023-12 Retired at year end; ThetaGPU hardware later repurposed into a new system, Sophia source
2023-12 Decommissioned source

Public list appearances

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

#16: TOP500, June 2017 →

Site & facility

Argonne Leadership Computing Facility

Location: Lemont, IL, USA
Cooling: Direct liquid cooling (warm water)
Commissioned: 2006

alcf.anl.gov anl.gov

Change history

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

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
web.archive.org	names system only	-
top500.org	names system and part	Cray Aries, Cray Linux Environment

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