Supercomputers/Systems/Darwin III
United Kingdom · operational · hpc
Darwin III
Also known as Cambridge Darwin III
Operated by University of Cambridge .
Researched with AI assistance, checked by scripts. These rows were researched by AI agents reading public operator, laboratory and vendor sources, appended by scripts and checked by automated validation; no subject-matter expert has reviewed them (how this site is made). A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1350 of 1540 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 64 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
- 183.38 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 202.34 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 90.6%
- Cores
- 9,728
- Power
- 975 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 | - Dell PowerEdge C6220 | Dell Technologies | - | Reported | top500.orgcsd3.cam.ac.uk |
| CPU | Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPUs x86-64 · 8C · 2.6 GHz · 32 nm · 115 W Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.6GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.orgcsd3.cam.ac.uk |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond Infiniband FDR | Mellanox NVDANASDAQ
rolls up to NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.orgcsd3.cam.ac.uk |
The read
Third generation of the University of Cambridge's Darwin service, run by its HPC Service. Cambridge's history page says Darwin III arrived in 2012 as a tenfold performance step with 600 nodes, 9,600 Sandy Bridge cores and 183.38 TF, ranked 93rd on the June 2012 TOP500; it also served DiRAC2 (STFC-funded) nationally and was relocated in 2013 to free data-centre capacity, the year the Wilkes I GPU cluster (see wilkes) was added. TOP500 lists a Dell PowerEdge C6220 with Xeon E5-2670 and FDR InfiniBand, 9,728 cores, Rmax 183.38 TF, Rpeak 202.34 TF and 975 kW, and keeps it on lists through Jun 2015 (rank 433); the 128-core gap between 9,600 and 9,728 is unexplained in either source. Not to be confused with the older Darwin I and II.
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
- 2026-10-17 Darwin III added from its source pages
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 |
|---|---|---|
| csd3.cam.ac.uk | names system only | - |
| top500.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon E5-2670, Mellanox InfiniBand FDR |
Checked 2026-10-18 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.