Supercomputers/Systems/Lichtenberg II
Germany · operational · hpc
Lichtenberg II
Also known as Lichtenberg II Phase 1; Lichtenberg 2
Operated by TU Darmstadt at TU Darmstadt Lichtwiese Campus .
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
- 3.15 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 4.35 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 72.4%
- Cores
- 59,136
- Power
- 690 kW
- Per watt
- 4.6 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 | - MEGWARE MiriQuid, 630 MPI nodes | MEGWARE | - | Reported | top500.orghrz.tu-darmstadt.de |
| CPU | - Two Intel Xeon Platinum 9242 48C (Cascade Lake) per MPI node | Intel | 630 reported | Reported | top500.orghrz.tu-darmstadt.de |
| Interconnect | - Mellanox InfiniBand HDR100 (100 Gbit/s) | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.orghrz.tu-darmstadt.de |
The read
TU Darmstadt's Lichtenberg II first phase, a MEGWARE MiriQuid hot-water-cooled cluster whose 630 MPI nodes each carry two Xeon Platinum 9242 (48-core Cascade Lake) CPUs on InfiniBand HDR100, with additional V100/A100 GPU nodes and DGX A100 nodes in the later configuration. MEGWARE calls it the fastest university HPC system in Germany at its June 2020 debut (92nd on the TOP500) and notes waste heat feeds the Lichtwiese campus district heating. TOP500 lists 59,136 cores, Rmax 3.15 and Rpeak 4.35 PFlop/s at 690 kW, still listed in June 2026.
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
TU Darmstadt Lichtwiese Campus
- Location
- Darmstadt, Germany
- Cooling
- Hot-water cooling with waste heat to district heating
- Commissioned
- 2020
Change history
- 2026-10-02 Added Lichtenberg II, TU Darmstadt's hot-water-cooled MEGWARE cluster, 92nd on the June 2020 TOP500
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 only | - |
| hrz.tu-darmstadt.de | 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.