Supercomputers/Systems/Bell (Purdue)
USA · operational · hpc
Bell (Purdue)
Also known as Bell
Operated by Purdue University at Purdue RCAC (West Lafayette) .
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
- 1.62 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 1.90 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 85.3%
- Cores
- 59,520
- Power
- 314.6 kW
- Per watt
- 5.1 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 | - 448 Dell compute nodes plus 8 large-memory nodes | Dell Technologies | - | Reported | rcac.purdue.edutop500.org |
| Accelerator | - 16 AMD Instinct GPUs | AMD | 16 reported | Reported | rcac.purdue.edu |
| CPU | - AMD EPYC 7662 64C 2GHz (Rome), two per node across 448 nodes | AMD | 896 reported | Reported | top500.orgrcac.purdue.edu |
| Interconnect | NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR Interconnect Fat tree or dragonfly+ · 200 Gb/s per port · About 0.6 microseconds Mellanox InfiniBand HDR100 | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
Purdue's ninth community cluster, announced for faculty use on 16 November 2020: 448 Dell nodes with two 64-core AMD EPYC Rome processors and 256 GB each, 8 one-terabyte large-memory nodes, 16 AMD Instinct GPUs and a 5 PB Lustre file system. TOP500 lists 59,520 cores on HDR100 InfiniBand and 1.62 PFlop/s Rmax, rank 429 on the November 2020 list (Purdue's announcement says 431). Purdue planned a six-year service life.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
Change history
- 2026-10-02 Added Bell, Purdue's AMD EPYC community cluster
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 |
|---|---|---|
| top500.org | names system and part | NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR |
| rcac.purdue.edu | 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.