Supercomputers/Systems/CLAIX-2023
Germany · operational · mixed
CLAIX-2023
Operated by RWTH Aachen University .
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
- 5.24 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 9.63 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 54.4%
- Cores
- 28,704
- Power
- 154.95 kW
- Per watt
- 33.8 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 | - NEC HPC12G4Rk-3 DLC direct water-cooled servers | NEC | - | Verified | blog.rwth-aachen.detop500.org |
| Accelerator | - 52 ML nodes with four NVIDIA H100 GPUs each (quantity derived as 52 x 4) | NVIDIA | 208 reported | Reported | blog.rwth-aachen.detop500.org |
| CPU | Intel Xeon Platinum 8468 CPUs x86-64 · 48C · 2.1 GHz · Intel 7 · 350 W 632 HPC nodes with Intel Xeon Platinum 8468 Sapphire Rapids (96 cores per node; quantity is nodes) | Intel | 632 reported | Reported | blog.rwth-aachen.detop500.org |
| Interconnect | NVIDIA InfiniBand NDR (Quantum-2) Interconnect Fat tree or dragonfly+ · 400 Gb/s per port · Under 0.6 microseconds NDR InfiniBand RDMA network | NVIDIA | - | Verified | blog.rwth-aachen.detop500.org |
The read
RWTH Aachen University's NEC-built CLAIX-2023 cluster, in pilot operation from January 2024 and funded in part through NHR4CES. RWTH's IT Center describes 632 direct-water-cooled HPC nodes with Intel Xeon Platinum 8468 Sapphire Rapids CPUs (96 cores per node, about 4 PFlop/s peak), 52 machine-learning nodes with four NVIDIA H100 GPUs each (over 14 PFlop/s in the ML segment), NDR InfiniBand and a 26 PiB Lustre file system. TOP500 lists the GPU segment (NEC HPC12G4Rk-3 DLC, Xeon Platinum 8468, NVIDIA H100, InfiniBand NDR, Rocky Linux 8) with 28,704 cores, 5.24 PFlop/s Rmax and 9.63 PFlop/s Rpeak, ranked 229th in June 2024. The FLOPS and core figures in this row are that GPU segment only, not the whole machine.
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
- 2026-10-02 Added CLAIX-2023 (RWTH Aachen University)
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 |
|---|---|---|
| blog.rwth-aachen.de | could not be fetched | - |
| top500.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon Platinum 8468, NVIDIA InfiniBand NDR (Quantum-2) |
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.