Germany · operational · hpc

L-CSC

Also known as Lattice-CSC

Operated by GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research at GSI Helmholtz Centre (Darmstadt) .

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: 316.70 TFlop/s
Rpeak: 593.60 TFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 53.4%
Cores: 10,976
Power: 57.15 kW
Per watt: 5.5 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 ESC4000 FDR/G2S	ASUS 2357Taiwan Stock Exchange	-	Reported	top500.org top500.org
Accelerator	AMD FirePro S9150 Accelerators TSMC 28nm 4 AMD FirePro S9150 GPUs per node, 160 nodes	AMD AMDNASDAQ	640 reported	Verified	top500.org phys.org
CPU	Intel Xeon E5-2690 v2 CPUs x86-64 · 10C · 3 GHz · 22 nm · 130 W 2 Intel Xeon E5-2690 v2 per node, 160 nodes	Intel INTCNASDAQ	320 reported	Verified	top500.org phys.org
Interconnect	Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond InfiniBand FDR	Mellanox NVDANASDAQ rolls up to NVIDIA	-	Reported	top500.org

The read

Built at GSI's Darmstadt site for Lattice QCD physics rather than as a general-purpose machine, L-CSC was the first AMD-GPU-powered system to top the Green500 list, reaching 5.27 GFlops/Watt in November 2014, an 18 percent improvement over the June 2014 winner. Four AMD FirePro S9150 cards per node across 160 ASUS ESC4000 servers did the arithmetic; GSI and the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt built and operated it jointly. TOP500's own system page states 10,976 total cores against phys.org's contemporary count of 1,600 cores; this row leaves that discrepancy unresolved rather than guessing, in the same spirit as the other open core-count conflicts already logged elsewhere in this dataset. GSI's own account and the independent phys.org report agree on the rank, efficiency and hardware, so the tier is verified. Current operational status has not been independently confirmed since its last public TOP500 appearance in mid 2016; we carry the last documented state rather than inferring a retirement.

Timeline

2014 Announced source
2014-11 List debut at #1 (November 2014) source
2014-11 First operational source

Public list appearances

Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.

Site & facility

GSI Helmholtz Centre (Darmstadt)

Location: Darmstadt, Germany
Commissioned: 2014

gsi.de phys.org

Change history

2026-09-24 L-CSC added (GSI Helmholtz Centre, Germany)

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
phys.org	could not be fetched	-
top500.org	names system and part	AMD FirePro S9150

Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.