Supercomputers/Systems/Yellowstone
USA · decommissioned · hpc
Yellowstone
Operated by NCAR at NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing 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
- 1.26 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 1.50 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 84.0%
- Cores
- -
- Power
- 1.44 MW
- Per watt
- 0.9 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 | - IBM iDataPlex dx360 M4 | IBM | - | Verified | cisl.ucar.edutop500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond Mellanox FDR InfiniBand, single-plane full fat tree | Mellanox NVDANASDAQ
rolls up to NVIDIA | - | Verified | cisl.ucar.edutop500.org |
The read
NCAR's first petascale machine and the first system at the NCAR-Wyoming centre: an IBM iDataPlex of 4,536 dx360 M4 nodes on FDR InfiniBand, 13th on the November 2012 TOP500, in production from 20 December 2012 and retired at the end of 2017 in favour of Cheyenne. NCAR and TOP500 disagree on the processor (E5-2650 against E5-2670), the core count (72,576 against 72,288) and the power draw (about 1.2 MW against 1,437 kW), so none of those is recorded and each is logged. The site row for the Wyoming centre carries 2016 as its commissioning year, which is Cheyenne's date rather than Yellowstone's. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax and Rpeak, so the tier is reported.
Timeline
- 2012-11 List debut at #13 (November 2012) source
- 2012-12 First operational source
- 2017-12 Performed its last calculation on December 30 after five and a half years source
- 2017-12 Decommissioned source
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center
- Location
- Cheyenne, WY, USA
- Commissioned
- 2016
Where sources disagree
We record conflicts instead of picking a winner quietly. All open questions.
- Core count: 72,576 cores (NCAR CISL) against 72,288 cores (TOP500). No core count is recorded.
- Processor: Xeon E5-2650 (NCAR CISL) against Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.6GHz (TOP500). No CPU edge is recorded.
- Power draw: about 1.2 MW (NCAR CISL) against 1,436.72 kW (TOP500). The two may measure different things; no figure is recorded.
Change history
- 2026-09-20 Added with a rank pointer; NCAR and TOP500 disagree on CPU, cores and power
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 |
|---|---|---|
| cisl.ucar.edu | names system and part | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR |
| top500.org | names system and part | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR |
Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.