Supercomputers/Systems/Curie
France · decommissioned · hpc
Curie
Also known as Curie thin nodes
Operated by CEA at Very Large Computing Centre (TGCC) .
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
- 1.36 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 1.67 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 81.5%
- Cores
- 77,184
- Power
- 2.13 MW
- Per watt
- 0.6 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 | - Bullx B510 | Bull | - | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | Intel Xeon E5-2680 CPUs x86-64 · 8C · 2.7 GHz · 32 nm · 130 W Xeon E5-2680 8C 2.700GHz | 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
The Bull bullx B510 thin-node partition of the GENCI-funded Curie petascale machine for PRACE, hosted at CEA's TGCC. TOP500 lists 77,184 Xeon E5-2680 8-core 2.7 GHz cores on InfiniBand QDR, ninth on the June 2012 list. The hybrid partition is a separate TOP500 entry and is not covered here. CEA's TGCC page says Joliot-Curie replaced Curie in September 2018, but TOP500 keeps listing the thin nodes for later editions, so no retirement date is recorded. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, Rpeak, cores and power, 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
Change history
- 2026-10-02 Added Curie thin nodes at TGCC, ninth on the June 2012 TOP500
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 E5-2680, Mellanox InfiniBand QDR |
| www-hpc.cea.fr | names system only | - |
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.