Taiwan · decommissioned · hpc

ALPS (NCHC)

Also known as Windrider; Advanced Large-scale Parallel Supercluster

Operated by National Center for High-Performance Computing at NCHC Taichung .

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: 177.10 TFlop/s
Rpeak: 231.86 TFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 76.4%
Cores: 26,244
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	- Acer AR585 F1 cluster, over 600 Acer servers	Acer	-	Verified	top500.org hexus.net
CPU	- AMD Opteron 6174 12C 2.2GHz	AMD AMDNASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org
Interconnect	Mellanox InfiniBand QDR Interconnect Fat tree · 40 Gb/s per 4x port InfiniBand QDR	NVIDIA NVDANASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org
Storage	- DataDirect Networks storage, named by Acer as a build partner	DDN	-	Reported	webwire.com

The read

Taiwan's fastest supercomputer of its day: an Acer AR585 F1 cluster of AMD Opteron 6174 12-core 2.2 GHz CPUs on InfiniBand QDR, built for NCHC in Taichung. TOP500 lists 26,244 cores, 177.1 TFlop/s Rmax and 231.86 TFlop/s Rpeak, 42nd on the June 2011 list and 138th in November 2012. Acer's own release independently gives 177 TFlop/s, rank 42, more than 25,000 cores on AMD Opteron 6000 series, eight compute clusters plus one large-memory cluster, a July 2011 start of service and the Windrider nickname; Hexus reports the tender win and a planned March 2011 completion. Status as of is the last TOP500 list it appeared on (June 2015); no retirement notice was found.

Timeline

2011-07 First operational source
2012-11 List debut at #138 (November 2012) source

Public list appearances

Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.

#138: TOP500, November 2012 →

Site & facility

NCHC Taichung

Location: Taichung, Taiwan
Commissioned: 2011

hexus.net webwire.com

Change history

2026-10-02 Added ALPS, Taiwan NCHC's 2011 Acer 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.

Every source cited on this page was readable, and none of them mentions this system. They are cited at page granularity, normally because no stable deep link could be found. That is a real weakness in this row and it is why the system carries a confidence tier below verified. See how this check works.

Cited source	Result	Found on the page
top500.org	does not name this system	Mellanox InfiniBand QDR
webwire.com	does not name this system	-

Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.