Carter (Purdue)

Also known as Purdue Carter community cluster

Operated by Purdue University at Purdue RCAC (West Lafayette) .

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: 186.90 TFlop/s
Rpeak: 215.65 TFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 86.7%
Cores: 10,368
Power: 252 kW
Per watt: 0.7 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	- HP Cluster Platform 3000 SL6500 compute nodes	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Reported	top500.org rcac.purdue.edu
CPU	Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPUs x86-64 · 8C · 2.6 GHz · 32 nm · 115 W Intel Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.6 GHz, two per node	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org rcac.purdue.edu
Interconnect	Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond FDR InfiniBand 56 Gbps	Mellanox NVDANASDAQ rolls up to NVIDIA	-	Reported	top500.org rcac.purdue.edu

The read

Purdue's Carter community cluster, built with Intel, HP and Mellanox on pre-release Xeon E5 Sandy Bridge processors and FDR InfiniBand. Purdue's Rosen Center announced it as 54th on the November 2011 TOP500 and 38th on the Green500, and its retired-resource page says Carter launched in November 2011 with HP nodes of two 8-core Xeon E5 CPUs, 56 Gbps FDR InfiniBand and a few GPU nodes, and was decommissioned on 30 April 2017. TOP500 confirms 54th in November 2011 with 10,368 cores, 186.9 TFlop/s Rmax, 215.65 TFlop/s Rpeak and 252 kW, and keeps it on the list through June 2015. Two independent organisations agree on the hardware, ranking and dates, so the tier is verified. Purdue lists the formal install date as 13 April 2012; the 2011 date here is its November 2011 launch and TOP500 debut.

Timeline

2011-11 List debut at #54 (November 2011) source
2011-11 First operational source
2017-04-30 Decommissioned source

Public list appearances

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

#54: TOP500, November 2011 →

Site & facility

Purdue RCAC (West Lafayette)

Location: West Lafayette, IN, USA
Commissioned: 2022

rcac.purdue.edu

Change history

2026-10-09 Added Carter (Purdue), listed on the TOP500 in 2011-11

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
rcac.purdue.edu	names system only	-
top500.org	names system and part	Intel Xeon E5-2670, Mellanox InfiniBand FDR

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