Supercomputers/Systems/Colosse
Canada · operational · hpc
Colosse
Also known as CLUMEQ Colosse; Universite Laval Colosse supercomputer
Operated by CLUMEQ at Colosse Silo, Universite Laval .
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
- 77.17 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 85.30 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 90.5%
- Cores
- 7,616
- Power
- 332 kW
- Per watt
- 0.2 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 | - Sun Blade x6048 blade system | Sun Microsystems | - | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon X5560 quad-core 2.8 GHz, 7,616 cores | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR Interconnect Fat tree · 40 Gb/s per 4x port InfiniBand QDR | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
Sun Microsystems blade supercomputer of the CLUMEQ consortium at Universite Laval in Quebec City. A 2010 Laval news article says it won an InfoWorld Green 15 award for its energy-efficient design: servers arranged concentrically on two floors of a silo-shaped building at the north end of the Alexandre-Vachon pavilion, which once housed a Van de Graaff accelerator, with server heat recovered into campus heating, a project budget of 12.5 million Canadian dollars and an electricity bill expected near 200,000 dollars a year. TOP500 lists a Sun Blade x6048 system with 7,616 Xeon X5560 quad-core 2.8 GHz cores on InfiniBand QDR at 77.17 TFlop/s Rmax, 85.30 TFlop/s Rpeak and 332 kW, 63rd in November 2009, then 72nd, 98th, 119th, 187th, 314th and 477th in November 2012, its last appearance. A Wikipedia entry on CLUMEQ gives 960 Sun Blade X6275 nodes and 7,680 cores, slightly different from TOP500. Hardware figures rest on TOP500, so the tier is reported.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
Colosse Silo, Universite Laval
- Location
- Quebec City, Canada
- Cooling
- Concentric air flow with heat recovery to campus heating
- Commissioned
- 2009
Change history
- 2026-10-09 Added Colosse
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 |
|---|---|---|
| nouvelles.ulaval.ca | names system only | - |
| top500.org | names system and part | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR |
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.