Supercomputers/Systems/AWE Vulcan
United Kingdom · operational · classified
AWE Vulcan
Also known as Vulcan
Operated by AWE at AWE Aldermaston .
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
- -
- Rpeak
- 7.00 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- -
- Cores
- -
- 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 | - Cray Shasta system (Cray, an HPE company) | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | globenewswire.comawe.co.uk |
| CPU | - 2nd Generation AMD EPYC 7542 processors | AMD | - | Reported | globenewswire.com |
| Interconnect | - Cray Slingshot interconnect | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | globenewswire.com |
| Storage | - Cray ClusterStor Lustre storage, nearly 100 GB/s I/O | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | globenewswire.com |
The read
Named 'Vulcan' after the RAF's V-bomber, in the same naming tradition AWE uses for its HPC estate; it shares that name by coincidence with LLNL's unrelated BlueGene/Q-era Vulcan, which is why this row's page title reads 'AWE Vulcan' rather than plain 'Vulcan'. A Cray Shasta system (Cray was already an HPE subsidiary by the November 2019 announcement) built around 2nd Generation AMD EPYC 7542 processors and Cray Slingshot interconnect with ClusterStor Lustre storage, procured for the UK's Trident warhead stockpile stewardship programme. AWE's own announcement gives no exact node count or final measured performance figure; the roughly 7 petaflops figure is the vendor's pre-deployment target stated at the selection announcement, not a confirmed post-installation measurement, and no public TOP500 submission has been found for it, which is typical for UK defence HPC. It entered active service in December 2021 after site acceptance testing in spring 2021.
Site & facility
Change history
- 2026-09-24 AWE Vulcan added, the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment's Cray Shasta system for Trident stockpile stewardship
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 |
|---|---|---|
| awe.co.uk | names system only | - |
| globenewswire.com | names system only | - |
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.