Supercomputers/Systems/CARO
Germany · operational · hpc
CARO
Also known as Computer for Advanced Research in Aerospace
Operated by DLR at DLR Gottingen Supercomputing Centre .
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
- 3.46 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 5.59 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 61.9%
- Cores
- 174,592
- Power
- 800 kW
- Per watt
- 4.3 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 HPC2808Ri-2 | NEC | - | Verified | top500.orghpcwire.com |
| CPU | - AMD EPYC 7702 64C 2GHz | AMD | 174,592 reported | Verified | top500.orghpcwire.com |
| Interconnect | NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR Interconnect Fat tree or dragonfly+ · 200 Gb/s per port · About 0.6 microseconds InfiniBand HDR100 | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
DLR's aerospace and transport-research supercomputer at its Gottingen campus, operated jointly with the University of Gottingen and GWDG. An NEC HPC2808Ri-2 cluster of AMD EPYC 7702 processors on InfiniBand HDR100, drawing up to 800 kW with a reported PUE near 1.1 under water cooling. TOP500 independently lists Rmax 3.46 PFlop/s, matching HPCwire's account of the same figure and NEC as the builder, so the tier is verified; DLR's own page states peak performance as '5.6 quadrillion operations per second', consistent with but not phrased identically to TOP500's 5.59 PFlop/s Rpeak. First appeared on the November 2021 TOP500 list at rank 135.
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
DLR Gottingen Supercomputing Centre
- Location
- Gottingen, Germany
- Cooling
- Direct liquid cooling
- PUE
- 1.1
- Commissioned
- 2021
Change history
- 2026-09-24 CARO added, DLR's aerospace-research supercomputer at Gottingen
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 | NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR |
| hpcwire.com | could not be fetched | - |
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.