Supercomputers/Systems/Dawson2 (UCLA)
USA · operational · hpc
Dawson2 (UCLA)
Also known as UCLA Dawson2 GPU cluster
Operated by University of California, Los Angeles .
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
- 70.28 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 160.58 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 43.8%
- Cores
- 5,184
- Power
- 96.03 kW
- Per watt
- 0.7 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 | - HP ProLiant SL390s G7 servers | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.orgidre.ucla.edu |
| Accelerator | - NVIDIA Tesla M2070 GPUs, 3 per node, 96 nodes | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.orgidre.ucla.edu |
| CPU | Intel Xeon X5650 CPUs x86-64 · 6C · 2.66 GHz · 32 nm · 95 W Intel Xeon X5650 6C 2.66 GHz, dual socket nodes | Intel | - | Reported | top500.orgidre.ucla.edu |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR Interconnect Fat tree · 40 Gb/s per 4x port QDR InfiniBand | Mellanox NVDANASDAQ
rolls up to NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.orgidre.ucla.edu |
| Storage | Panasas ActiveScale (PanFS) Storage Object storage, blade shelves (1 director + 10 storage blades) Panasas storage, 160 TB | Panasas | - | Reported | top500.orgidre.ucla.edu |
The read
NSF MRI-funded GPU cluster at UCLA's Institute for Digital Research and Education, built from 96 HP ProLiant SL390s G7 servers with dual Xeon X5650 CPUs, three Nvidia M2070 GPUs and 48 GB of memory per node on QDR InfiniBand, with 160 TB of Panasas storage. IDRE's facilities summary quotes 150 TFlop/s peak and 70 TFlop/s Linpack. TOP500 first listed it at 148th in June 2011 with a partial 2,482-core run at 68.10 TFlop/s; the figures here (5,184 cores counting GPU cores, 70.28 TFlop/s Rmax, 160.58 TFlop/s Rpeak, 96.03 kW) are from the full run shown on its TOP500 page, which also had it 235th in November 2011 and 384th in June 2012. The IDRE document is dated 2016, but the last TOP500 list is the evidence used for status.
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
- 2026-10-09 Added Dawson2 (UCLA), listed on the TOP500 in 2011-06
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 |
|---|---|---|
| idre.ucla.edu | does not name this system | - |
| top500.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon X5650, 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.