Supercomputers/Systems/Monte Rosa
Switzerland · decommissioned · hpc
Monte Rosa
Also known as CSCS Monte Rosa Cray XE6
Operated by CSCS .
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
- 297.00 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 402.12 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 73.9%
- Cores
- 47,872
- 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 XE6 | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.orgcscs.ch |
| CPU | - Opteron 6272 16C 2.1GHz | AMD | - | Reported | top500.orgcscs.ch |
| Interconnect | Cray Gemini Interconnect 3D torus · About 6 GB/s per direction per link · Around 1 microsecond Cray Gemini interconnect | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
CSCS's Cray XE6, the national flagship before Piz Daint, 34th on the November 2011 TOP500. TOP500 lists 47,872 Opteron 6272 16-core 2.1 GHz cores on the Cray Gemini interconnect at 297.0 TFlop/s Rmax and 402.12 TFlop/s Rpeak on that list, and shows the system from June 2010 to November 2014. CSCS's decommissioned-systems page independently confirms the Cray XE6, 1,496 compute nodes of two 16-core Opteron 6272 processors, 47,872 cores, over 46 TB of memory and 402 TFlops, and CSCS's 2015 news item says the Cray XE6 came online in May 2009 and was decommissioned in 2015 after about six years, with Piz Daint taking over its role. The 2015 date is the year of that announcement. The cited pages do not state the machine room, so no site is attached. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, so the tier is reported.
Timeline
- 2009-05 First operational source
- 2011-11 List debut at #34 (November 2011) source
- 2015 Decommissioned source
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Change history
- 2026-10-02 Added Monte Rosa, the CSCS Cray XE6, 34th on the November 2011 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 and part | Cray Gemini |
| cscs.ch | 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.