Netherlands · decommissioned · hpc

Cartesius

Operated by SURF at SURF (Amsterdam Science Park) .

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: 1.09 PFlop/s
Rpeak: 1.33 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 82.0%
Cores: 38,880
Power: 706 kW
Per watt: 1.5 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	- Bull bullx DLC B710/B720 blades	Bull ATOEPA rolls up to Atos	-	Verified	top500.org computable.nl
CPU	Intel Xeon E5-2690 v3 CPUs x86-64 · 12C · 2.6 GHz · 22 nm · 135 W Xeon E5-2690 v3 12C 2.6GHz (later nodes; earliest nodes ran Xeon E5-2695 v2)	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org
Interconnect	Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond InfiniBand FDR	NVIDIA NVDANASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org
Cooling	Direct liquid cooling, warm water Cooling Direct-to-chip cold plates, facility water loop · Removes 90+ percent of node heat to liquid Bull direct liquid cooling, PUE about 1.2	Bull ATOEPA rolls up to Atos	-	Reported	computable.nl

The read

SURFsara's (now SURF's) national system before Snellius, a Bull bullx DLC system put into service on 14 June 2013 as the successor to the IBM Huygens machine, at the same Amsterdam Science Park site Snellius now occupies. Dutch trade outlet Computable and TOP500 independently name Bull as builder, so the integrator edge is verified; the exact mixed Xeon E5-2690 v3 and older E5-2695 v2 configuration and all quantitative figures come from TOP500 alone, since Computable describes only 'new-generation Intel Xeon chips'. Computable also names Bull's direct liquid cooling and a PUE around 1.2, sourced from that one article. SURF's own Amsterdam Science Park announcement for Snellius states plainly that 'after eight years of service, Cartesius has retired', consistent with an April 2021 handover, but gives no exact retirement date, so none is recorded here. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, Rpeak and core count, so the tier is reported.

Timeline

2013-06 First operational source
2014-11 List debut at #46 (November 2014) source

Public list appearances

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

#46: TOP500, November 2014 →

Site & facility

SURF (Amsterdam Science Park)

Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Commissioned: 2021

amsterdamsciencepark.nl

Change history

2026-09-23 Added, SURF's predecessor to Snellius at the same Amsterdam Science Park site, with a rank pointer on the edition where it ranked highest

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
computable.nl	names system and part	Intel Xeon E5-2690 v3, Direct liquid cooling, warm water
top500.org	names system and part	Intel Xeon E5-2690 v3, Mellanox InfiniBand FDR

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