Supercomputers/Systems/AlphaCentauri
Germany · operational · mixed
AlphaCentauri
Also known as Alpha Centauri
Operated by TU Dresden at TU Dresden ZIH .
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
- 2.59 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 5.36 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 48.3%
- Cores
- 31,008
- Power
- 163.65 kW
- Per watt
- 15.8 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 | - NEC GPU cluster | NEC | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Accelerator | NVIDIA A100 SXM4 40GB Accelerators CUDA (Ampere GA100) · 6,912C · 1.41 GHz · 7 nm · 400 W NVIDIA A100 40GB SXM4, eight per node with NVLink | NVIDIA | - | Reported | doc.zih.tu-dresden.detop500.org |
| CPU | - AMD EPYC 7352 24C 2.3GHz, two per node | AMD | - | Reported | doc.zih.tu-dresden.detop500.org |
| Interconnect | NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR Interconnect Fat tree or dragonfly+ · 200 Gb/s per port · About 0.6 microseconds InfiniBand HDR200, two ConnectX-6 ports at 200 Gb/s per node | NVIDIA | - | Verified | doc.zih.tu-dresden.detop500.org |
The read
NEC-built GPU cluster at TU Dresden's ZIH for machine learning and GPU workloads. ZIH documents nodes with two AMD EPYC 7352 24-core CPUs, eight NVIDIA A100 40GB GPUs linked by NVLink and two 200 Gb/s InfiniBand ConnectX-6 ports; the documentation notes the cluster is out of vendor support so some nodes may have fewer working GPUs. TOP500 lists 31,008 cores and 2.59 PFlop/s Rmax, 181st on the June 2021 list.
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
Change history
- 2026-10-02 Added AlphaCentauri, TU Dresden's A100 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 |
|---|---|---|
| doc.zih.tu-dresden.de | names system and part | NVIDIA A100 SXM4 40GB, NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR |
| top500.org | names system and part | NVIDIA A100 SXM4 40GB, NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR |
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.