Supercomputers/Systems/Brutus
Switzerland · operational · hpc
Brutus
Also known as ETH Brutus cluster
Operated by ETH Zurich .
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
- 51.88 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 64.64 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 80.3%
- Cores
- 6,464
- Power
- 152 kW
- Per watt
- 0.3 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 | - Sun Blade X6440 blade cluster | Sun Microsystems | - | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | - AMD Opteron quad-core 2.5 GHz, 6,464 cores | AMD | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
ETH Zurich's shared Brutus cluster. A Wikipedia article says Brutus was built in May 2008 and grew into a mixed AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon system on a Gigabit Ethernet backbone with InfiniBand QDR on most nodes, ranked the 88th fastest computer in November 2009, with the later Euler as its successor. TOP500 lists a Sun Blade X6440 entry with 6,464 Opteron quad-core 2.5 GHz cores on InfiniBand at 51.88 TFlop/s Rmax, 64.64 TFlop/s Rpeak and 152 kW (the TOP500 installation year is 2009), then 103rd and 150th in 2010, 278th in June 2011 and 477th in November 2011, its last appearance. Only the 2009 listed configuration is described here; TOP500 and Wikipedia are the only sources, 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.
Change history
- 2026-10-09 Added Brutus
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 only | - |
Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.