Supercomputers/Systems/Thunderbird
USA · decommissioned · hpc
Thunderbird
Also known as Sandia Thunderbird Linux cluster
Operated by Sandia National Laboratories at Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque .
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
- 46.40 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 57.60 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 80.6%
- Cores
- 8,000
- 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Integrator | - Dell PowerEdge 1850 servers, 4,096 nodes at delivery | Dell Technologies | - | Reported | sandia.govtop500.org |
| CPU | - Intel EM64T Xeon 3.6 GHz, two per node | Intel | - | Reported | sandia.govtop500.org |
| Interconnect | - Cisco InfiniBand interconnect | Cisco | - | Reported | sandia.govtop500.org |
The read
Sandia's institutional capacity cluster of Dell PowerEdge 1850 servers with dual 3.6 GHz Intel EM64T processors on a Cisco InfiniBand fabric, installed at the Central Computing Facility in Albuquerque in 2005. Sandia's lab news describes a 4,096-node system with over 8,000 processors, delivered by the end of July 2005, and a later Sandia release describes 4,480 servers reaching 53 TFLOPS and sixth place in November 2006. TOP500 lists it fifth on the November 2005 list at 46.4 TFLOPS Rmax with 8,000 cores; the figures here are that first entry. No retirement date was found. TOP500 and Sandia agree on the hardware but only TOP500 gives the Rmax, 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
Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque
- Location
- Albuquerque, NM, USA
- Cooling
- Chilled water
- Commissioned
- 1990
Change history
- 2026-10-02 Added Thunderbird, Sandia's Dell InfiniBand cluster
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 only | - |
| sandia.gov | 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.