Supercomputers/Systems/Cedar (SFU)
Canada · decommissioned · hpc
Cedar (SFU)
Also known as Cedar
Operated by Simon Fraser University at SFU Burnaby .
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
- 1.34 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 2.86 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 46.9%
- Cores
- 35,712
- Power
- 167 kW
- Per watt
- 8.0 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 | - Dell EMC PowerEdge C4130 and C6320 servers, 902 nodes, sold by Scalar Decisions | Dell Technologies | - | Reported | digitalengineering247.comtop500.org |
| Accelerator | NVIDIA Tesla P100 Accelerators CUDA (Pascal GP100) · 3,584C · 1.48 GHz · 16 nm · 300 W 584 NVIDIA P100 Tesla GPUs in 146 nodes | NVIDIA | 584 reported | Reported | top500.orgtop500.org |
| CPU | Intel Xeon E5-2650 v4 CPUs x86-64 · 12C · 2.2 GHz · 14 nm Intel Xeon E5-2650v4 12C 2.2GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Omni-Path Architecture Interconnect Fat tree · 100 Gb/s per port · About 1 microsecond Intel Omni-Path Architecture fabric | Intel | - | Reported | digitalengineering247.comtop500.org |
The read
Compute Canada national system launched in April 2017 at Simon Fraser University's Burnaby data centre: Dell EMC PowerEdge C4130 and C6320 servers on Intel Omni-Path, 3.6 PFlop/s peak and 11.4 PB of storage per a Digital Engineering 24/7 article. The TOP500 entry for this original configuration (Xeon E5-2650v4 and 584 NVIDIA P100 GPUs in 146 nodes, 35,712 cores) was listed June 2017 to November 2020 and reached 1.34 PFlop/s Rmax, 410th on the November 2019 list. It was later expanded with new CPU and GPU partitions that the TOP500 lists as separate Cedar (CPU) and Cedar (GPU) entries.
Timeline
- 2017-04 First operational source
- 2019-11 List debut at #410 (November 2019) source
- 2025-09-12 Decommissioned source
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
Change history
- 2026-10-02 Added Cedar, the Compute Canada system at SFU
- 2026-10-02 Marked Cedar (SFU) decommissioned
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 |
|---|---|---|
| top500.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon E5-2650 v4, NVIDIA Tesla P100, Omni-Path Architecture |
| digitalengineering247.com | names system and part | Intel Xeon E5-2650 v4, Omni-Path Architecture |
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.