Supercomputers/Systems/Biowulf
USA · operational · hpc
Biowulf
Also known as NIH Biowulf
Operated by NIH .
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
- 1.97 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 2.49 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 79.1%
- Cores
- 66,304
- 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 Apollo 2000 Gen8/Gen9 | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 CPUs x86-64 · 14C · 2.4 GHz · 14 nm · 120 W Xeon E5-2680v4 14C 2.4GHz (plus E5-2695v3 nodes) | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond Infiniband FDR | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
The NIH intramural research cluster run by the High Performing Computation group. TOP500 lists an HPE Apollo 2000 Gen8/Gen9 system of Xeon E5-2680v4 and E5-2695v3 nodes on InfiniBand FDR with 66,304 cores, 1.97 PFlop/s Rmax and 2.49 PFlop/s Rpeak, installed 2016; it appeared on lists from November 2016 to June 2023 and ranked 217th in June 2020 (entry recorded here). NIH describes Biowulf today as a 95,000+ core, 40+ PB Linux cluster with over 4,000 compute nodes for biosciences workloads such as molecular dynamics, so the TOP500 figures cover only the benchmarked portion.
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
- 2026-10-02 Added Biowulf, NIH
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 |
|---|---|---|
| hpc.nih.gov | names system and part | Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 |
| top500.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4, Mellanox InfiniBand FDR |
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.