Supercomputers/Systems/Thunder
USA · decommissioned · hpc
Thunder
Also known as LLNL Itanium 2 Quadrics cluster
Operated by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at Livermore Computing Center .
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
- 19.94 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 22.94 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 86.9%
- Cores
- 4,096
- 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | - Itanium 2 1.4GHz (Tiger4 nodes) | Intel | - | Reported | top500.orglinuxtoday.com |
| Interconnect | Quadrics QsNet Interconnect Fat tree · 340 MB/s per direction · About 2 microseconds Quadrics QsNet II | Quadrics | - | Reported | top500.orglinuxtoday.com |
The read
Lawrence Livermore's Linux cluster of 4,096 Itanium 2 1.4 GHz processors on Quadrics QsNet II, made by California Digital Corporation per TOP500. It was second on the June 2004 list at 19.94 TFLOPS, behind only the Earth Simulator, and was described as the largest Itanium 2 deployment and the largest QsNet II installation. TOP500 lists it until November 2008; no page we fetched gives a retirement date, so none is recorded. TOP500 is the only source for Rpeak, so the tier is reported.
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
Livermore Computing Center
- Location
- Livermore, CA, USA
- Cooling
- Direct liquid cooling (warm water)
- Commissioned
- 1996
Change history
- 2026-10-02 Added Thunder, the LLNL Itanium 2 cluster, second on the June 2004 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 |
|---|---|---|
| linuxtoday.com | names system and part | Quadrics QsNet |
| top500.org | names system and part | Quadrics QsNet |
Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.