Supercomputers/Systems/AWE Damson
United Kingdom · operational · hpc
AWE Damson
Also known as Damson
Operated by AWE .
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
- 3.24 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 3.79 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 85.5%
- Cores
- 113,832
- Power
- 1.13 MW
- Per watt
- 2.9 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 | - Bull Sequana X1000 (Atos) | Bull | - | Reported | top500.orginsidehpc.com |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon E5-2697v4 18C 2.3GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand EDR Interconnect Fat tree · 100 Gb/s per 4x port · About 0.9 microseconds Mellanox EDR InfiniBand | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.orginsidehpc.com |
| Storage | - Seagate Lustre storage appliance, about 100 GB/s I/O | Seagate | - | Reported | theregister.com |
The read
The Atomic Weapons Establishment's Atos Bull Sequana X1000 supercomputer, ordered in 2017 for nuclear warhead simulation under the UK test-ban commitments: dual Xeon E5-2697v4 18-core nodes on Mellanox EDR InfiniBand with direct liquid cooling and Seagate Lustre storage. The order was announced as a 4.3 PFlop/s system; TOP500 lists 113,832 cores, Rmax 3.24 and Rpeak 3.79 PFlop/s at 1,134 kW, first at 47th in June 2018 and still listed in June 2026. Separate from the later AWE Vulcan.
Timeline
- 2017 First operational source
- 2017-07 Announced source
- 2020-11 List debut at #93 (November 2020) source
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Change history
- 2026-10-02 Added AWE Damson, the Atomic Weapons Establishment Bull Sequana, 93rd on the November 2020 TOP500
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 |
|---|---|---|
| insidehpc.com | could not be fetched | - |
| top500.org | names system and part | Mellanox InfiniBand EDR |
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.