Supercomputers/Systems/Beskow
Sweden · decommissioned · hpc
Beskow
Also known as PDC Cray XC40
Operated by PDC Center for HPC at PDC Data Centre, KTH .
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
- 1.80 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 2.44 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 73.8%
- Cores
- 67,456
- Power
- 842 kW
- Per watt
- 2.1 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 | - Cray XC40 | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.orgpdc.kth.se |
| CPU | Intel Xeon E5-2698 v3 CPUs x86-64 · 16C · 2.3 GHz · 22 nm · 135 W Intel Xeon E5-2698v3 Haswell 16-core 2.3 GHz in 9 cabinets | Intel | - | Reported | pdc.kth.se |
| CPU | Intel Xeon E5-2695 v4 CPUs x86-64 · 18C · 2.1 GHz · 14 nm · 120 W Intel Xeon E5-2695v4 Broadwell 18-core 2.1 GHz in 2 cabinets | Intel | - | Reported | pdc.kth.se |
| Interconnect | Cray Aries Interconnect Dragonfly · About 10 GB/s per direction · Around 1 microsecond Cray Aries (Dragonfly topology) | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | pdc.kth.se |
The read
PDC's Cray XC40 at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, which PDC's own page describes as a flagship system from 2015 to 2020: 2,060 compute nodes and 67,456 cores in 11 cabinets, nine of Haswell Xeon E5-2698v3 and two of Broadwell Xeon E5-2695v4, on Cray Aries, with a 2.43 petaflop peak. TOP500 first lists the original 53,632-core Haswell system 33rd in November 2014; the 67,456-core figures and the rank recorded here, 70th in November 2017, are the expanded system. PDC says the planned December 2019 retirement was extended to at least the end of 2020, so no decommission date is recorded. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, so the 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.
Site & facility
Change history
- 2026-10-02 Added Beskow, PDC's Cray XC40 at KTH
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 |
|---|---|---|
| pdc.kth.se | names system and part | Intel Xeon E5-2698 v3, Intel Xeon E5-2695 v4, Cray Aries |
| top500.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon E5-2698 v3, Intel Xeon E5-2695 v4, Cray Aries |
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.