Supercomputers/Systems/Lincoln (NCSA Windows)
USA · operational · hpc
Lincoln (NCSA Windows)
Also known as NCSA Lincoln Windows Compute Cluster
Operated by NCSA .
Researched with AI assistance, checked by scripts. These rows were researched by AI agents reading public operator, laboratory and vendor sources, appended by scripts and checked by automated validation; no subject-matter expert has reviewed them (how this site is made). A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1350 of 1540 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 64 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
- 4.11 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 5.76 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 71.4%
- Cores
- 900
- Power
- -
- Per watt
- - 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 | - Dell PowerEdge 1855 blade servers | Dell Technologies | - | Reported | microsoft.comtop500.org |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon EM64T 3.2 GHz (896 processors per Microsoft, 900 cores per TOP500) | Intel | - | Reported | top500.orgmicrosoft.com |
| Interconnect | - Cisco Topspin InfiniBand switches | Cisco | - | Reported | microsoft.com |
| Operating system | - Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 | Microsoft | - | Reported | microsoft.comtop500.org |
The read
Dell blade cluster at NCSA running Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, one of the few Windows machines to reach the TOP500. A Microsoft HPC team blog post on the June 2006 list (announced at ISC in Dresden) places it at number 131, benchmarked at 4.1 Tflops on 896 Intel Xeon (x64) processors using Dell PowerEdge 1855 blades, Cisco Topspin InfiniBand switches and Force10 Gigabit Ethernet switches, and states Microsoft's aim of one Windows cluster on the list each year. TOP500 lists 900 cores of 3.2 GHz Xeon EM64T, 4.11 TFlop/s Rmax and 5.76 TFlop/s peak, with this single June 2006 entry; the 896 versus 900 difference is not explained.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Change history
- 2026-10-17 Lincoln (NCSA Windows) added from its source pages
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 |
|---|---|---|
| microsoft.com | names system only | - |
| top500.org | names system only | - |
Checked 2026-10-18 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.