Australia · decommissioned · hpc

Magnus

Operated by Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre at Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre .

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: 1.10 PFlop/s
Rpeak: 1.49 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 73.8%
Cores: -
Power: 697.5 kW
Per watt: 1.6 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	- Cray XC40	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Verified	top500.org itnews.com.au
CPU	Intel Xeon E5-2690 v3 CPUs x86-64 · 12C · 2.6 GHz · 22 nm · 135 W Xeon E5-2690v3 12C 2.6GHz	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org itnews.com.au
Interconnect	Cray Aries Interconnect Dragonfly · About 10 GB/s per direction · Around 1 microsecond Aries interconnect	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Reported	top500.org
Operating system	Cray Linux Environment Operating systems Linux, Cray-customised · Proprietary layer over open-source Linux Cray Linux Environment	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Reported	top500.org

The read

Pawsey's Cray XC40 with Haswell Xeon E5-2690 v3 CPUs on Aries, once the most powerful scientific machine in the Southern Hemisphere. TOP500 ranks it 42nd on the November 2014 list, its best; iTnews reported 41st at the time of the announcement. Pawsey's migration FAQ says Magnus has been decommissioned, without a date, and Setonix replaced it. TOP500 gives 35,712 cores and iTnews 35,172, so no core count is recorded and the conflict is logged. The first-operational year is TOP500's installation year. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, Rpeak and core count, so the tier is reported.

Timeline

2014 First operational source
2014-11 List debut at #42 (November 2014) source

Public list appearances

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

#42: TOP500, November 2014 →

Site & facility

Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre

Location: Kensington, Australia
Commissioned: 2022

pawsey.org.au

Where sources disagree

We record conflicts instead of picking a winner quietly. All open questions.

Core count: 35,712 (TOP500) against 35,172 (iTnews). The iTnews figure may be a transposition. No core count is recorded.

Change history

2026-09-20 Added with a rank pointer; its core count is disputed

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
pawsey.atlassian.net	names system and part	Cray Aries
top500.org	names system and part	Intel Xeon E5-2690 v3, Cray Aries, Cray Linux Environment

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