Supercomputers/Systems/Merlin (Cardiff)
United Kingdom · operational · hpc
Merlin (Cardiff)
Also known as Cardiff ARCCA Bull cluster; SRIF-3 supercomputer
Operated by Cardiff University at Cardiff ARCCA Computing Facility .
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
- 20.00 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 24.58 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 81.4%
- Cores
- 2,048
- 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 | - Bull Novascale R422 cluster | Bull | - | Reported | top500.orgscientific-computing.com |
| CPU | Intel Xeon E5450 CPUs x86-64 · 4C · 3 GHz · 45 nm · 120 W Intel Xeon E5450 quad-core 3.0 GHz (system string says E5472) | Intel | - | Reported | top500.orgscientific-computing.com |
The read
Bull Novascale R422 cluster that opened Cardiff University's Advanced Research Computing division (ARCCA) in June 2008 as a 2.9 million pound installation. Scientific Computing World describes a Bull high performance computer with Intel quad-core Xeons, about four terabytes of memory and a measured 20 trillion floating point operations per second, serving health, neuroscience, geoscience, astrophysics and the humanities. InsideHPC (2 June 2008, read from an archived copy) adds that it is housed in 10 water-cooled racks fed by three water tanks, that it was funded through the SRIF-3 grant from the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, and that it later corrected its claim that this was the first quad-core installation at a UK university after SGI pointed to its earlier Exeter system. The name Merlin appears only in the TOP500 entry, not in the fetched Cardiff coverage. TOP500 lists 2,048 cores on InfiniBand with 20.00 TFlop/s Rmax at 89th in June 2008 (20.12 thereafter, last at 499th in November 2009) and 24.58 peak; its processor field says Xeon E5450 at 3 GHz while the system string says E5472.
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
Cardiff ARCCA Computing Facility
- Location
- Cardiff, United Kingdom
- Commissioned
- 2008
Change history
- 2026-10-17 Merlin (Cardiff) 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 |
|---|---|---|
| scientific-computing.com | does not name this system | Intel Xeon E5450 |
| top500.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon E5450 |
Checked 2026-10-18 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.