Hercules (MSU HPC2)

Also known as Hercules; Mississippi State Hercules

Operated by Mississippi State University at Mississippi State University HPC2 .

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: 2.14 PFlop/s
Rpeak: 3.01 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 71.1%
Cores: 40,960
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 C6520 original 512 nodes plus 512 Dell Sapphire Rapids nodes added in 2025	Dell Technologies DELLNYSE	1,024 reported	Reported	docs.hpc.msstate.edu top500.org
CPU	- Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 40C 2.3GHz on the original nodes, 80 cores per node	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org docs.hpc.msstate.edu
CPU	Intel Xeon Platinum 8460Y+ CPUs x86-64 · 40C · 2 GHz · Intel 7 · 300 W Intel Xeon Platinum 8460Y+ 2.0GHz Sapphire Rapids nodes added in 2025	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	docs.hpc.msstate.edu
Interconnect	- NVIDIA/Mellanox InfiniBand HDR/NDR, 200 Gbit/s node to node	NVIDIA NVDANASDAQ	-	Reported	docs.hpc.msstate.edu top500.org

The read

Mississippi State University's Dell PowerEdge C6520 cluster of 512 original nodes (80 Xeon Platinum 8380 cores and 512 GB each) on HDR/NDR InfiniBand, expanded in 2025 with 512 Dell Sapphire Rapids nodes to 1,024 compute nodes and 512 TB of RAM. TOP500 lists the original build at 40,960 cores, 2.14 PFlop/s Rmax and 3.01 PFlop/s Rpeak (which MSU also quotes as its peak), 369th in November 2022 and 496th in June 2024. The HPL and core figures cover the original 512 nodes only; the MSU page lists 81,920 cores for the expanded system but the same page's per-CPU core counts are internally inconsistent, so it is not used for the cores column.

Timeline

2022 First operational source
2022-11 List debut at #369 (November 2022) source

Public list appearances

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

#369: TOP500, November 2022 →

Site & facility

Mississippi State University HPC2

Location: Starkville, MS, USA

hpc.msstate.edu

Change history

2026-10-02 Added Hercules, Mississippi State's Dell cluster, 369th on the November 2022 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
docs.hpc.msstate.edu	names system and part	Intel Xeon Platinum 8460Y+
top500.org	names system and part	Intel Xeon Platinum 8460Y+

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