Supercomputers/Systems/Formosa 5
Taiwan · operational · hpc
Formosa 5
Also known as NCHC Formosa 5 GPU cluster
Operated by National Center for High-Performance Computing .
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
- 89.94 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 155.08 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 58.0%
- Cores
- 4,968
- Power
- 110 kW
- Per watt
- 0.8 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 | - NCHC built the cluster in-house (listed as self-made) | National Center for High-Performance Computing | - | Reported | top500.orgnchc.org.tw |
| Accelerator | - NVIDIA Tesla 2070 GPUs | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.orgnchc.org.tw |
| CPU | Intel Xeon X5670 CPUs x86-64 · 6C · 2.93 GHz · 32 nm · 95 W Intel Xeon X5670 6C 2.93GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.orgnchc.org.tw |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR Interconnect Fat tree · 40 Gb/s per 4x port InfiniBand QDR interconnect | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.orgnchc.org.tw |
The read
NCHC's in-house built CPU plus GPU hybrid cluster of Xeon X5670 hosts with NVIDIA Tesla 2070 GPUs on QDR InfiniBand, the fifth of the Formosa series. NCHC's own system history and the TOP500 agree on 4,968 cores, 89.94 TFlop/s Linpack and 155.08 TFlop/s peak; it ranked 232nd in June 2012 (Green500 62nd per NCHC) and 374th in November 2012.
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
- 2026-10-07 Added Formosa 5
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 |
|---|---|---|
| nchc.org.tw | names system and part | Intel Xeon X5670, Mellanox InfiniBand QDR |
| top500.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon X5670, Mellanox InfiniBand QDR |
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.