Supercomputers/Systems/Joliot-Curie SKL
France · decommissioned · hpc
Joliot-Curie SKL
Also known as Irene SKL
Operated by CEA at Very Large Computing Centre (TGCC) .
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
- 4.07 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 6.64 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 61.2%
- Cores
- 79,488
- Power
- 917 kW
- Per watt
- 4.4 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 | - Bull Sequana X1000 | Eviden | - | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | - Xeon Platinum 8168 24C 2.7GHz (Skylake), 1,656 dual-socket nodes, 79,488 cores | Intel | - | Verified | top500.orgwww-hpc.cea.fr |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand EDR Interconnect Fat tree · 100 Gb/s per 4x port · About 0.9 microseconds InfiniBand EDR | Mellanox NVDANASDAQ
rolls up to NVIDIA | - | Verified | top500.orgwww-hpc.cea.fr |
| Operating system | - bullx SCS | Eviden | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
Skylake partition of the GENCI-owned Joliot-Curie machine, an Atos Bull Sequana X1000 at CEA's TGCC, 34th on the June 2018 TOP500. TOP500 and CEA's own page agree on the hardware: 1,656 dual-socket Xeon Platinum 8168 24-core 2.7 GHz nodes (79,488 cores) on InfiniBand EDR; TOP500 gives 4.07 PFlop/s Rmax and 6.64 PFlop/s Rpeak while CEA quotes 6.86 PFlop/s peak. CEA says the machine was deployed at the end of 2017 and that this partition is now stopped, so it is recorded as decommissioned with no stop date, even though TOP500 still lists the entry in June 2026. The later AMD Rome partition is a separate row (joliot-curie-rome).
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 Added Joliot-Curie SKL, CEA Skylake partition
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 |
|---|---|---|
| www-hpc.cea.fr | names system and part | Mellanox InfiniBand EDR |
| top500.org | names system and part | Mellanox InfiniBand EDR |
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.