Supercomputers/Systems/Béluga
Canada · operational · mixed
Béluga
Operated by Calcul Québec at École de technologie supérieure (Calcul Québec) .
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
- 2.28 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 7.49 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 30.4%
- Cores
- 72,480
- Power
- 240 kW
- Per watt
- 9.5 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 | - Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 servers | Dell Technologies | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Accelerator | NVIDIA Tesla V100 Accelerators CUDA (Volta GV100) · 5,120C · 1.53 GHz · 12 nm · 300 W NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs, 688 across the cluster per the Calcul Quebec portal | NVIDIA | 688 reported | Reported | portail.beluga.calculquebec.catop500.org |
| CPU | Intel Xeon Gold 6148 CPUs x86-64 · 20C · 2.4 GHz · 14 nm · 150 W Intel Xeon Gold 6148 20C 2.4GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand EDR Interconnect Fat tree · 100 Gb/s per 4x port · About 0.9 microseconds InfiniBand EDR | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
General-purpose Digital Research Alliance of Canada (formerly Compute Canada) cluster at the Ecole de technologie superieure in Montreal, run by Calcul Quebec and made available in early April 2019 per McGill's announcement. A Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 system of Xeon Gold 6148 CPUs with NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs on InfiniBand EDR, 106th on the June 2019 TOP500 at 2.28 PFlop/s Rmax. The Calcul Quebec portal states 688 GPUs and over 38,960 cores for the cluster as a whole, against 72,480 cores in the TOP500 entry (which counts GPU cores), so core totals are not directly comparable.
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
École de technologie supérieure (Calcul Québec)
- Location
- Montreal, Canada
- Commissioned
- 2021
Change history
- 2026-10-02 Added Béluga, Calcul Québec's V100 cluster in Montreal
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 |
|---|---|---|
| portail.beluga.calculquebec.ca | does not name this system | · counts: 688 |
| top500.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon Gold 6148, NVIDIA Tesla V100, 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.