Supercomputers/Systems/Earth System Numerical Simulator
China · decommissioned · hpc
Earth System Numerical Simulator
Also known as Prototype Earth System Numerical Simulator; LASG Sugon TC4600E
Operated by IAP, Chinese Academy of Sciences .
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
- 738.00 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 1.00 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 73.8%
- Cores
- 24,912
- Power
- 540 kW
- Per watt
- 1.4 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 | - Sugon Cluster TC4600E | Sugon | - | Reported | top500.orgprnewswire.com |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon E5-2680v3 12C 2.5GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond InfiniBand FDR | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
The Sugon TC4600E cluster at the LASG laboratory of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, the prototype of the national Earth System Numerical Simulator (EarthLab): Xeon E5-2680 v3 12-core 2.5 GHz CPUs on InfiniBand FDR. TOP500 lists 24,912 cores, 738 TFlop/s Rmax, about 1.0 PFlop/s Rpeak and 540 kW, 182nd on the November 2016 list after debuting in June 2015. Sugon's ISC 2015 release independently presents a Sugon Earth System Simulator, but gives no node, CPU or Linpack figures, so the second source supports the project and vendor only and the tier is reported. Status as of is the last TOP500 list it appeared on (June 2018). The later Sugon Si-Cube 'Pre Earth Simulator v2' (48,000 cores, 2018) is a separate TOP500 entry not added here.
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
- 2026-10-02 Added the IAP CAS Earth System Numerical Simulator prototype
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 | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR |
| prnewswire.com | 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.