Supercomputers/Systems/COBALT 2.0
Netherlands · operational · hpc
COBALT 2.0
Also known as LOFAR correlator; Correlator and Beamforming Application platform for the LOFAR Telescope
Operated by ASTRON .
Researched with AI assistance, checked by scripts. These rows were researched by AI agents reading public operator, laboratory and vendor sources, appended by scripts and checked by automated validation; no subject-matter expert has reviewed them (how this site is made). A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1350 of 1540 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 64 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
- -
- Rpeak
- 427.00 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- -
- Cores
- -
- Power
- 10 kW
- 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Accelerator | NVIDIA Tesla V100 Accelerators CUDA (Volta GV100) · 5,120C · 1.53 GHz · 12 nm · 300 W 26x NVIDIA Tesla V100 | NVIDIA | 26 reported | Reported | astron.nl |
| CPU | - 26x Intel Xeon Gold SP6140 2.30GHz | Intel | 26 reported | Reported | astron.nl |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand EDR Interconnect Fat tree · 100 Gb/s per 4x port · About 0.9 microseconds 26x EDR InfiniBand 100 Gb/s | NVIDIA | 26 reported | Reported | astron.nl |
The read
Central GPU correlator and beamformer of the LOFAR low-frequency radio telescope, run by ASTRON with the Center for Information Technology of the University of Groningen. It succeeded the first GPU COBALT (2013), which succeeded the IBM Blue Gene/L and P correlators (2004 and 2008); that first COBALT reached end of life in early 2019 when its warranty ended. Procured through an EU-wide tender under the LOFAR Mega Mode proposal (NWO-M grant 2017, work from 2018), the hardware arrived in early 2019, passed validation in February 2019 and entered regular use in summer 2019. ASTRON's table lists 13 nodes with 26 Intel Xeon Gold 6140 CPUs, 26 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs, 26 EDR InfiniBand links and 104 10 GbE inputs, 63 TFLOP/s of CPU and 364 TFLOP/s of GPU compute, and a peak draw printed as 10 kWh (read here as kW). Rpeak is the sum of the two stated figures, not an HPL result. It can ingest the streams of 48 high-band and 96 low-band antenna fields at once (148 and 296 Gb/s). The page is dated 15 June 2020, so the current configuration may differ.
Timeline
- 2019 First operational source
Change history
- 2026-10-18 Added COBALT 2.0 (ASTRON)