Supercomputers/Systems/Grace (UCL)
United Kingdom · operational · hpc
Grace (UCL)
Also known as UCL Grace
Operated by UCL at VIRTUS Slough (UCL) .
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
- 341.30 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 420.25 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 81.2%
- Cores
- 10,944
- Power
- 615.6 kW
- Per watt
- 0.6 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 | - OCF designed and integrated the system | OCF | - | Reported | web.uk-plc.net |
| Integrator | - Lenovo NeXtScale nx360 M5 servers | Lenovo | - | Verified | top500.orgweb.uk-plc.net |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon E5-2630 v3 8C 2.4GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR Interconnect Fat tree · 40 Gb/s per 4x port InfiniBand QDR | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Storage | - DDN SFA7700 storage, 500TB usable | DDN | - | Reported | web.uk-plc.net |
The read
UCL's flagship HPC service, named for Grace Hopper, designed and integrated by OCF on Lenovo NeXtScale servers with DDN SFA7700 storage (500TB usable) and housed at the VIRTUS shared research data centre in Slough. The OCF announcement gives 181 TFlop/s at launch and a go-live of December 2015. TOP500 (June 2016, rank 401) lists the expanded system as Lenovo NeXtScale nx360M5 with Xeon E5-2630v3 8C 2.4GHz on InfiniBand QDR, 10,944 cores, Rmax 341.3 and Rpeak 420.25 TFlop/s at 615.6 kW. A later Lenovo NeXtScale cluster of 17,280 Xeon E5-2650v4 cores with Omni-Path from the same UCL site appeared on the November 2016 TOP500 and is not recorded here.
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
- 2026-10-09 Added Grace (UCL)
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 QDR |
| web.uk-plc.net | 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.