Supercomputers/Systems/CERT Blue Gene
United Arab Emirates · operational · hpc
CERT Blue Gene
Also known as CERT eServer Blue Gene
Operated by CERT UAE .
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: 1263 of 1345 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 56 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
- 4.73 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 5.73 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 82.5%
- 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 | - IBM eServer Blue Gene Solution (TOP500 listing) | IBM | - | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | IBM PowerPC 440 700MHz CPUs PowerPC · 2C · 0.7 GHz · 130 nm · 13 W IBM PowerPC 440 2C 700MHz, 2,048 cores (TOP500 listing) | IBM | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | - Proprietary Blue Gene interconnect (TOP500 listing) | IBM | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
A first-generation IBM Blue Gene system at the Centre of Excellence for Applied Research and Training (CERT) in the United Arab Emirates. TOP500 lists 2,048 cores of PowerPC 440 2C 700MHz with a proprietary interconnect, 4.73 TFlop/s Rmax and 5.73 TFlop/s Rpeak (the list tables show 4.71 TFlop/s Rmax), ranked 139th on the November 2006 list and 376th on the June 2007 list, which is the basis for the status date. Wikipedia's CERT Group article says CERT's Blue Gene offered 5.7 teraflops to corporate clients for biotechnology, nanotechnology, genetics and oil and gas simulation, and calls it the only supercomputing centre in the South Asia, Middle East and North Africa region; that article's only citation is a dead archived CERT page, so the claim is not independently confirmed. TOP500 does not give the city, so the system is left unlocated, and no power figure appears on its system page.
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 CERT Blue Gene
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 |
|---|---|---|
| en.wikipedia.org | names system only | - |
| top500.org | does not name this system | IBM PowerPC 440 700MHz |
Checked 2026-10-13 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.