Supercomputers/Systems/Epic (iVEC)
Australia · operational · hpc
Epic (iVEC)
Also known as Epic
Operated by Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre at iVEC at Murdoch University .
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
- 87.20 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 107.52 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 81.1%
- Cores
- 9,600
- 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 Performance Optimised Datacentre (HP Pod BL2x220) | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.orgcug.org |
| CPU | - Xeon X5660 6C 2.8GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.orgcug.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR Interconnect Fat tree · 40 Gb/s per 4x port QDR InfiniBand | Mellanox NVDANASDAQ
rolls up to NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.orgcug.org |
The read
Stage 1A pathfinder CPU cluster of iVEC's Pawsey project, hosted at Murdoch University in Perth. iVEC's CUG 2013 slides describe an HP Performance Optimised Datacentre with 800 nodes of 12 cores (9,600 cores at 2.8 GHz), 24 GB per node, QDR InfiniBand, 87 TF peak and a debut at #88 on the TOP500, and place Epic's operational date at mid 2011, with the GPU cluster Fornax at UWA as stage 1B. TOP500 lists it from Nov 2010 (rank 88) to Nov 2012 (rank 395) as an HP Pod BL2x220 with Xeon X5660, Rmax 87.2 TF and Rpeak 107.52 TF, installation year 2010. Two source discrepancies: the slides' 87 TF peak equals the Linpack figure rather than TOP500's Rpeak, and the Nov 2010 list entry predates the slides' mid-2011 operational date. Per Wikipedia, iVEC was rebranded as the Pawsey centre in Dec 2014, which is why the operator is the Pawsey record.
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 Epic (iVEC) 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 |
|---|---|---|
| cug.org | names system only | - |
| top500.org | does not name this system | 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.