United Kingdom · decommissioned · hpc

ARCHER

Operated by EPCC at Advanced Computing Facility, Edinburgh .

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: 1.64 PFlop/s
Rpeak: 2.55 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 64.4%
Cores: 118,080
Power: 3.31 MW
Per watt: 0.5 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	- Cray XC30, 4,920 compute nodes	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Verified	top500.org phys.org
CPU	Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2 CPUs x86-64 · 12C · 2.7 GHz · 22 nm · 130 W Xeon E5-2697 v2 12C 2.7GHz, two per node	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org
Interconnect	Cray Aries Interconnect Dragonfly · About 10 GB/s per direction · Around 1 microsecond Cray Aries, Dragonfly topology	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Reported	top500.org
Operating system	Cray Linux Environment Operating systems Linux, Cray-customised · Proprietary layer over open-source Linux Cray Linux Environment	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Reported	top500.org

The read

The UK national service before ARCHER2, a Cray XC30 of 4,920 nodes on the Aries dragonfly fabric, first listed on TOP500 in November 2013 at rank 20 and officially inaugurated the following March. Phys.org and TOP500 independently confirm Cray as builder and the EPSRC-funded, University of Edinburgh-hosted service, so the integrator edge is verified; the exact Xeon E5-2697 v2 SKU is named only by TOP500, since phys.org gives just the E5-2600v2 series, so that edge and all quantitative figures stay reported. EPSRC's GBP43 million contract funded it as the successor to HECToR. No fetchable source gives an exact decommissioning date, so that field is left blank rather than guessed; ARCHER2 took over the name in November 2021. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, Rpeak and core count, so the tier is reported.

Timeline

2013-11 List debut at #20 (November 2013) source
2013-11 First operational source

Public list appearances

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

#20: TOP500, November 2013 →

Site & facility

Advanced Computing Facility, Edinburgh

Location: Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Cooling: Direct liquid cooling
Commissioned: 1990

archer2.ac.uk

Change history

2026-09-23 Added, EPCC's predecessor to ARCHER2, with a rank pointer on the edition where it ranked highest

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
phys.org	could not be fetched	-
top500.org	names system and part	Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2, Cray Aries, Cray Linux Environment

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