Supercomputers/Systems/Faenov (Windows Azure)
USA · operational · hpc
Faenov (Windows Azure)
Also known as Faenov
Operated by Microsoft .
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
- 151.30 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 167.73 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 90.2%
- Cores
- 8,064
- 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 | - HPE Cluster Platform SL230s Gen8 | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.6GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR Interconnect Fat tree · 40 Gb/s per 4x port Infiniband QDR | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Operating system | - Operating System: Windows Azure, Microsoft MPI | Microsoft | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
Microsoft's early Windows Azure HPC entry on the TOP500: an HPE Cluster Platform SL230s Gen8 with Xeon E5-2670 processors, QDR InfiniBand, Windows Azure as the operating system and Microsoft MPI (8,064 cores, 151.30 TFlop/s Rmax). It was listed from November 2012 (rank 165) to June 2014 (rank 434). Microsoft's archived Windows HPC post on the A8 and A9 compute-intensive instances describes the InfiniBand RDMA hardware Azure sold from the same period, but it does not mention this entry, so the link is by hardware only. No datacentre is named.
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
- 2026-10-09 Added Faenov (Windows Azure)
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 |
|---|---|---|
| learn.microsoft.com | does not name this system | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR |
| top500.org | names system and part | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR |
Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.
Further reading
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.
Programming a supercomputer
The software stack beneath the application, and why the OS is now a sovereignty signal as much as a technical choice.