Supercomputers/Systems/AWE Spruce A
United Kingdom · operational · hpc
AWE Spruce A
Also known as Spruce A
Operated by AWE .
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
- 958.73 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 997.25 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 96.1%
- Cores
- 44,520
- Power
- 855.1 kW
- Per watt
- 1.1 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 | - SGI ICE X | SGI HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.orginformation-age.com |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon E5-2680v2 10C 2.8GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond Infiniband FDR | Mellanox NVDANASDAQ
rolls up to NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Operating system | SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Operating systems Linux distribution · Open source, commercial support subscription SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 | SUSE | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
One of the SGI ICE X supercomputers of the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment: Information Age reported on 20 June 2014 that a ceremony at AWE marked full operational status of three ICE X systems built by SGI, which support the science programme that verifies the safety and reliability of the Trident warhead without nuclear yield testing. TOP500 lists two of them, Spruce A (44,520 cores of Xeon E5-2680v2 10C 2.8 GHz on FDR InfiniBand, 958.73 TFlop/s Rmax, 997.25 TFlop/s Rpeak, 855.1 kW, SLES 11) and Spruce B (awe-spruce-b); the article does not name the third system. Scientific Computing (https://www.scientific-computing.com/news/uk-awe-awards-sgi-contract) describes AWE's Spruce as peaking at 1.8 PFlop/s, close to the 1.796 PFlop/s sum of the two TOP500 peaks, which suggests that figure covers A and B together. Listed from June 2015 (rank 74) to November 2018 (rank 448). A later contract for SGI ICE XA systems at AWE is described by Scientific Computing but is not recorded here. No site is recorded because the fetched pages do not give the location. Tier is reported.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Change history
- 2026-10-17 AWE Spruce A added from its source pages
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 |
|---|---|---|
| information-age.com | does not name this system | - |
| top500.org | names system and part | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server |
Checked 2026-10-18 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.