Supercomputers/Systems/Thunder (AFRL)
USA · operational · hpc
Thunder (AFRL)
Also known as AFRL DSRC Thunder
Operated by AFRL DSRC at AFRL DSRC (Wright-Patterson AFB) .
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
- 3.13 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 5.61 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 55.7%
- Cores
- 152,692
- Power
- 4.82 MW
- Per watt
- 0.6 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 SGI ICE X | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.orgnextplatform.com |
| Accelerator | - NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPUs | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.orgnextplatform.com |
| Accelerator | - Intel Xeon Phi 7120P coprocessors | Intel | - | Reported | top500.orgnextplatform.com |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon E5-2699v3 18C 2.3GHz and E5-2697v3 CPUs | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond Mellanox InfiniBand FDR | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Operating system | SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Operating systems Linux distribution · Open source, commercial support subscription SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 | SUSE | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
SGI ICE X system at the Air Force Research Laboratory DSRC with Intel Xeon E5-2699v3 and E5-2697v3 CPUs, NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPUs and Intel Xeon Phi 7120P coprocessors on FDR InfiniBand, running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11. TOP500 lists 152,692 cores, Rmax 3.126 PFlop/s, Rpeak 5.610 PFlop/s and 4,819.5 kW; it entered the June 2015 list at rank 19 and was still listed at rank 378 in June 2025. The Next Platform calls it a 2014-vintage 5.6 petaflop SGI ICE X with 17.3 PB of storage and, in March 2019, the fastest machine at the AFRL centre; the install year recorded here is TOP500's 2015. The name Thunder is also used by an unrelated Lawrence Livermore cluster already in the register.
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
AFRL DSRC (Wright-Patterson AFB)
- Location
- Wright-Patterson AFB, OH, USA
Change history
- 2026-10-07 Added Thunder, the AFRL DSRC SGI ICE X
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 | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server |
| nextplatform.com | names system only | - |
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.