United Kingdom · decommissioned · hpc

Blue Joule

Also known as STFC Blue Joule BlueGene/Q

Operated by STFC Hartree Centre at Hartree Centre Supercomputing Centre (Daresbury) .

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: 1.21 PFlop/s
Rpeak: 1.47 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 82.3%
Cores: 114,688
Power: 575 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	- IBM BlueGene/Q	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	top500.org phys.org
CPU	IBM PowerPC A2 (Power BQC) CPUs PowerPC A2 · 18C · 1.6 GHz · 45 nm · 55 W Power BQC 16C 1.6GHz	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	top500.org
Interconnect	IBM BlueGene/Q 5D torus Interconnect 5D torus · 2 GB/s per link per direction BlueGene/Q custom interconnect	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	top500.org

The read

STFC's IBM Blue Gene/Q at Daresbury Laboratory, shown by STFC at ISC 2012 as the UK's most powerful supercomputer and 13th in the world on the June 2012 list, 16th on the November 2012 TOP500. The November 2012 list gives 114,688 Power BQC 16-core 1.6 GHz cores at 1.208 PFlop/s Rmax and 1.468 PFlop/s Rpeak, which is what this row records; TOP500's current system page shows a later 131,072-core entry at 1.431 PFlop/s Rmax. Wikipedia's Hartree Centre article says it operated at the Hartree Centre from 2012 to 2016 and was then repurposed for the DiRAC facility at Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology, so 2016 marks the end of its Daresbury service only. STFC's announcement, republished by Phys.org, confirms the IBM hardware and the Daresbury location. TOP500 is the only source for the Rmax, Rpeak and core figures, so the tier is reported.

Timeline

2012 First operational source
2012-11 List debut at #16 (November 2012) source
2016 Decommissioned source

Public list appearances

Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.

#16: TOP500, November 2012 →

Site & facility

Hartree Centre Supercomputing Centre (Daresbury)

Location: Daresbury, Cheshire, United Kingdom
Cooling: Direct liquid cooling (warm water)
Commissioned: 2025

ukri.org news.lenovo.com

Change history

2026-10-02 Added Blue Joule, STFC's Blue Gene/Q at Daresbury, 16th on the November 2012 TOP500

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
en.wikipedia.org	names system only	-
top500.org	names system and part	IBM BlueGene/Q 5D torus

Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.