Supercomputers/Systems/BrENIAC
Belgium · decommissioned · hpc
BrENIAC
Also known as VSC Tier-1 BrENIAC
Operated by Flemish Supercomputer Centre .
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
- 548.00 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 619.32 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 88.5%
- Cores
- 16,128
- Power
- 255 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 | - NEC HPC1816Rg | NEC | - | Reported | top500.orgdocs.vscentrum.be |
| CPU | Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 CPUs x86-64 · 14C · 2.4 GHz · 14 nm · 120 W Xeon E5-2680v4 14C 2.4GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.orgdocs.vscentrum.be |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand EDR Interconnect Fat tree · 100 Gb/s per 4x port · About 0.9 microseconds InfiniBand EDR | Mellanox NVDANASDAQ
rolls up to NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.orgdocs.vscentrum.be |
The read
Second Flemish Supercomputer Centre Tier-1 cluster, hosted at KU Leuven and operated from 2016 to 2022 per the VSC documentation. The original NEC HPC1816Rg configuration used Xeon E5-2680v4 14-core CPUs on InfiniBand EDR; the VSC page also lists 408 Skylake nodes with Xeon Gold 6132 CPUs added later. TOP500 lists the June 2016 entry at 16,128 cores, 548.0 TFLOPS Rmax and 255 kW, ranked 197th; the current system page shows 26,908 cores and 1.00 PFLOPS after the expansion.
Timeline
- 2016 First operational source
- 2016-06 List debut at #197 (June 2016) source
- 2022 Decommissioned source
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 BrENIAC, the second Flemish Tier-1
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 |
|---|---|---|
| docs.vscentrum.be | names system and part | Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4, Mellanox InfiniBand EDR |
| top500.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4, 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.