Supercomputers/Systems/BuTinah
United Arab Emirates · decommissioned · hpc
BuTinah
Also known as NYUAD BuTinah HPC
Operated by NYU Abu Dhabi .
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
- 69.36 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 78.73 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 88.1%
- Cores
- 6,432
- 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 | - Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform SL390/BL2x220 cluster, 512 compute nodes | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | 512 reported | Reported | nyuad.nyu.edutop500.org |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon X5675 6C 3.06GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR Interconnect Fat tree · 40 Gb/s per 4x port InfiniBand QDR interconnect | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
NYU Abu Dhabi's first HPC cluster, an HP system named for a marine-protected archipelago off Abu Dhabi. NYUAD's previous-systems documentation says it was commissioned in April 2012, decommissioned in May 2016, delivered about 70 TFlop/s from 15 racks with 6,144 cores, and ranked 397th on the June 2012 TOP500. The university's news release describes 512 super-dense Hewlett-Packard compute nodes (at least 48 GB each, plus 192 GB memory nodes, a 1 TB node for the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, and GPU and visualization nodes), hosted at Injazat's headquarters in Abu Dhabi and linked to the Ankabut research network, in operation from January 2013. TOP500 lists a Cluster Platform SL390/BL2x220 with Xeon X5675 6C 3.06GHz on InfiniBand QDR, 6,432 cores, Rmax 69.36 and Rpeak 78.73 TFlop/s; the 6,432 cores recorded here follow TOP500, while NYUAD's page gives 6,144. It was succeeded by Dalma and then Jubail.
Timeline
- 2012-04 First operational source
- 2012-06 List debut at #397 (June 2012) source
- 2016-05 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
- 2026-10-09 Added BuTinah at NYU Abu Dhabi
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 |
|---|---|---|
| crc-docs.abudhabi.nyu.edu | names system only | - |
| top500.org | names system and part | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR |
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.