Supercomputers/Systems/Calhoun (MSI)
USA · operational · hpc
Calhoun (MSI)
Also known as Calhoun; Minnesota Supercomputing Institute SGI Altix XE 1300
Operated by University of Minnesota .
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
- 17.31 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 21.79 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 79.4%
- Cores
- 2,048
- 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 | - SGI Altix XE 1300 cluster, 256 Altix XE 300 nodes | SGI HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon quad-core 2.66 GHz Clovertown, two per node, 512 processors | Intel | 512 reported | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand DDR Interconnect Fat tree · 20 Gb/s per 4x port · About 2 microseconds InfiniBand DDR | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
SGI Altix XE 1300 Linux cluster at the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute of the University of Minnesota. MSI's page describes 256 SGI Altix XE 300 compute nodes, each with two quad-core 2.66 GHz Intel Xeon Clovertown-class processors and 16 GB of memory, 2,048 cores and 4 TB of memory in total. TOP500 lists 2,048 cores on InfiniBand DDR running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 at 17.31 TFlop/s Rmax and 21.79 TFlop/s Rpeak, rank 45 in June 2007, then 62nd, 125th, 268th and 492nd in June 2009, its last appearance. TOP500 credits the manufacturer as HPE, the current owner of the SGI brand; the machine was sold as SGI.
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 Calhoun (MSI)
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 |
|---|---|---|
| web.archive.org | names system only | - |
| top500.org | names system and part | Mellanox InfiniBand DDR |
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.