Supercomputers/Systems/Forerunner 1
Taiwan · operational · hpc
Forerunner 1
Operated by National Center for High-Performance Computing at NCHC Tainan Branch .
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
- 3.53 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 4.00 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 88.3%
- Cores
- 62,496
- Power
- 614.87 kW
- Per watt
- 5.7 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 | - ASUS RS723Q-E11-RS24 servers (TOP500 vendor ASUSTeK / ASUS Cloud / Taiwan Web Service Corporation) | ASUS | - | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | Intel Xeon Platinum 8480C CPUs x86-64 · 56C · 2 GHz · Intel 7 · 350 W Intel Xeon Platinum 8480+ 56C 2.0GHz, two per node across 558 x86-64 nodes | Intel | - | Verified | top500.orgnchc.org.tw |
| Interconnect | NVIDIA InfiniBand NDR (Quantum-2) Interconnect Fat tree or dragonfly+ · 400 Gb/s per port · Under 0.6 microseconds InfiniBand NDR200, 200 Gb/s per node | NVIDIA | - | Verified | top500.orgnchc.org.tw |
| Operating system | Red Hat Enterprise Linux Operating systems Linux distribution · Open source, commercial support subscription Red Hat Enterprise Linux | Red Hat | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
NCHC's Tainan-branch system that replaced Taiwania 1: 558 x86-64 nodes with two 56-core Intel Xeon Platinum 8480+ CPUs and 512 GB each on 200 Gb/s InfiniBand (62,496 cores), built with ASUS servers, plus 40 Arm-architecture nodes for heterogeneous testing and 9.2 PB of storage. NCHC announced activation in July 2024 and quotes about 3.5 PFlop/s; TOP500 gives Rmax 3.53, Rpeak 4.00 and 614.87 kW, first listed 221st in November 2023 and 359th in November 2025. NCHC and TOP500 agree on the core count and processor. TOP500 gives the installation year as 2023.
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
- 2026-10-02 Forerunner 1 added, verified on TOP500 and NCHC
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 | Intel Xeon Platinum 8480C, NVIDIA InfiniBand NDR (Quantum-2) |
| nchc.org.tw | names system and part | NVIDIA InfiniBand NDR (Quantum-2) |
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.