Supercomputers/Systems/EMERALD (RAL)
United Kingdom · operational · hpc
EMERALD (RAL)
Also known as EMERALD
Operated by Science and Technology Facilities Council at STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory .
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
- 114.40 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 257.58 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 44.4%
- Cores
- 6,960
- Power
- -
- Per watt
- - 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 Cluster Platform SL390s G7, 84 nodes | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | 84 reported | Reported | top500.orgscientific-computing.com |
| Accelerator | - 372 NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPUs | NVIDIA | 372 reported | Reported | top500.orgscientific-computing.com |
| CPU | - Xeon E5649 6C 2.53GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.orgscientific-computing.com |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR Interconnect Fat tree · 40 Gb/s per 4x port Infiniband QDR | Mellanox NVDANASDAQ
rolls up to NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.orgscientific-computing.com |
The read
GPU cluster at the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, run for the e-Infrastructure South consortium (Oxford, Bristol, Southampton and UCL). The trade report describes 84 nodes with 372 NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPUs and more than 114 TF, and says Emerald and other systems at the centre were funded by a GBP 3.7 million EPSRC grant; the article carries no date, so only the 2012 installation year from TOP500 is used. TOP500 lists an HP Cluster Platform SL390s G7 with Xeon E5649 and QDR InfiniBand, 6,960 cores, Rmax 114.4 TF and Rpeak 257.58 TF (GPU-inclusive), at rank 159 in Jun 2012, 242 in Nov 2012 and 380 in Jun 2013. Companion system Iridis 3 at Southampton shared the grant; the TOP500 page points at einfrastructuresouth.ac.uk/emerald.
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
- 2026-10-17 EMERALD (RAL) 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 |
|---|---|---|
| scientific-computing.com | names system only | - |
| top500.org | names system and part | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR |
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.