Supercomputers/Systems/Met Office Cray T3E1200
United Kingdom · operational · hpc
Met Office Cray T3E1200
Operated by Met Office .
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
- 526.0 GFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 763.2 GFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 68.9%
- Cores
- 636
- 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 | - Cray T3E massively parallel system | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | - DEC Alpha EV56 598 MHz, 636 processing elements | Digital Equipment Corporation HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | - Cray T3E 3-D torus interconnect | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Operating system | - UNICOS (UNICOS/mk on T3E nodes) | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
The UK Meteorological Office's Cray T3E1200 at 526 GFlop/s Rmax and 763.2 GFlop/s Rpeak, a later system than the Met Office T3E900 already in the atlas. TOP500 lists the Cray T3E with 636 processors (EV56 598 MHz, 3-D torus, UNICOS), TOP500 installation year 1999, ranked 13th in November 1999, then 20th, 29th, 39th, 51st, 80th, 112th, 170th and 306th in November 2003 (its last list). The record is sourced from TOP500 alone.
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
- 2026-10-09 Added Met Office Cray T3E1200
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 | - |
Checked 2026-10-13 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.