Supercomputers/Systems/Lengau
South Africa · operational · hpc
Lengau
Operated by CHPC at CHPC (Rosebank, Cape Town) .
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
- 1.03 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 1.37 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 75.2%
- Cores
- 32,856
- Power
- 685 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 | - Dell PowerEdge C6320, 1,039 servers in 19 racks | Dell Technologies | - | Verified | top500.orgchpc.ac.za |
| CPU | Intel Xeon E5-2690 v3 CPUs x86-64 · 12C · 2.6 GHz · 22 nm · 135 W Intel Xeon E5-2690 v3 12C 2.6GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond Mellanox FDR (56 Gbps) InfiniBand | NVIDIA | - | Verified | top500.orgwiki.chpc.ac.za |
| Operating system | CentOS Operating systems Linux distribution, RHEL-compatible rebuild · Open source, community-maintained CentOS | The CentOS Project | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
Dell's PowerEdge C6320 cluster at CHPC in Cape Town, 1,039 servers across 19 racks on Intel Xeon E5-2690 v3 12-core Haswell nodes plus a handful of four-socket Xeon E7-4870 large-memory 'fat' nodes, on FDR InfiniBand from Mellanox. It was the first system in Africa to cross the petaflop barrier, unveiled 22 February 2016 and debuting 122nd on the June 2016 TOP500, named Lengau (Setswana for cheetah) after CHPC's tradition of naming systems for fast animals, succeeding the earlier Tsessebe cluster. Dell's own unveiling and TOP500's coverage independently agree on the vendor, node count and interconnect family, so the tier is verified; TOP500 alone gives the precise Rmax, Rpeak, core count and power draw. CHPC's own current documentation describes a since-expanded configuration with NVIDIA V100 GPU nodes added and total cores near 32,832, which is a later-grown system rather than a contradiction of the figures recorded here, which describe the 2016 TOP500-benchmarked build. No decommissioning notice was found.
Timeline
- 2016-02 Announced source
- 2016-06 List debut at #122 (June 2016) source
- 2016-06 First operational 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
Where sources disagree
We record conflicts instead of picking a winner quietly. All open questions.
- Total storage capacity: 4 PB Lustre (TOP500 news coverage) against 5 PB total Dell storage (CHPC/CSIR unveiling release). CHPC/CSIR and TOP500 give different total storage figures for the same 2016 build; no capacity is recorded in system_components.
Change history
- 2026-09-22 Added with a rank pointer; sources disagree on total storage capacity
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 |
|---|---|---|
| chpc.ac.za | names system and part | Intel Xeon E5-2690 v3, Mellanox InfiniBand FDR |
| top500.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon E5-2690 v3, Mellanox InfiniBand FDR, CentOS |
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.