Lichtenberg I

Also known as Lichtenberg-Hochleistungsrechner Phase I; TU Darmstadt HLR

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: 1263 of 1345 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 56 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: 213.78 TFlop/s
Rpeak: 255.59 TFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 83.6%
Cores: 12,288
Power: 255.2 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	- IBM iDataPlex system	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	tu-darmstadt.de top500.org
Accelerator	NVIDIA Tesla K20X Accelerators CUDA (Kepler GK110) · 2,688C · 0.732 GHz · 28 nm · 235 W NVIDIA Tesla K20Xm GPUs, 43 nodes with 2 GPUs each	NVIDIA NVDANASDAQ	86 estimated	Reported	hkhlr.de tu-darmstadt.de
Accelerator	- Intel Xeon Phi accelerator nodes, 20 nodes	Intel INTCNASDAQ	20 reported	Reported	tu-darmstadt.de
CPU	Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPUs x86-64 · 8C · 2.6 GHz · 32 nm · 115 W Intel Xeon E5-2670 8-core 2.6 GHz	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org hkhlr.de
Interconnect	Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond Mellanox InfiniBand FDR	NVIDIA NVDANASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org

The read

The first Lichtenberg high-performance computer of TU Darmstadt and the Hessian HPC alliance, an IBM iDataPlex system inaugurated on 5 June 2013 with over 1,200 TFlop/s of combined computing power (23 percent from accelerators) at the time. The university describes over 700 standard nodes, four 1 TB large-memory nodes, 64 accelerator nodes (44 NVIDIA GPU, 20 Intel Xeon Phi), a 768 TB parallel file system, water cooling with free cooling and a 0.65 MW maximum draw once a second phase was added in 2014. The HKHLR cluster page lists the node type as dual Xeon E5-2670 (2 x 8 cores, 32 GB) with 43 nodes of two NVIDIA K20Xm GPUs, and states that Phase I was deactivated in April 2020. TOP500 lists the 12,288-core Xeon E5-2670 FDR InfiniBand part at 213.78 TFlop/s Rmax, 255.59 TFlop/s Rpeak and 255.2 kW, 148th in June 2013. Lichtenberg II is recorded separately.

Timeline

2013-06 List debut at #148 (June 2013) source
2013-06 First operational source
2020-04 Decommissioned source

Public list appearances

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

#148: TOP500, June 2013 →

Change history

2026-10-09 Added Lichtenberg I

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	does not name this system	Intel Xeon E5-2670, Mellanox InfiniBand FDR
tu-darmstadt.de	names system and part	Intel Xeon E5-2670

Checked 2026-10-13 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.

Lichtenberg I

Measured performance

What this machine is made of

The read

Timeline

Public list appearances

Change history

Source check

Further reading

Operating a supercomputer

Inside a node

The interconnect