China · operational · hpc

Nebulae

Operated by National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen at National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen .

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: 1.27 PFlop/s
Rpeak: 2.98 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 42.6%
Cores: 120,640
Power: 2.58 MW
Per watt: 0.5 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	- Dawning TC3600 Blade System	Sugon 603019SSE	-	Reported	top500.org
Accelerator	NVIDIA Tesla C2050 Accelerators CUDA (Fermi) · 448C · 1.15 GHz · 40 nm · 238 W NVIDIA Tesla C2050	NVIDIA NVDANASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org en.wikipedia.org
CPU	Intel Xeon X5650 CPUs x86-64 · 6C · 2.66 GHz · 32 nm · 95 W Intel Xeon X5650 6C 2.66GHz	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org en.wikipedia.org
Interconnect	Mellanox InfiniBand QDR Interconnect Fat tree · 40 Gb/s per 4x port InfiniBand QDR	NVIDIA NVDANASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org en.wikipedia.org

The read

Sugon's Dawning TC3600 Blade system at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, the same operator that built LineShine sixteen years later. Intel Xeon X5650 hosts paired with NVIDIA Tesla C2050 GPUs on InfiniBand QDR, second on the June 2010 TOP500 behind Jaguar and, at the time, the highest theoretical peak ever recorded on the list. No first-operational date is recorded: TOP500 gives an installation year of 2010 matching its June 2010 debut, while Wikipedia describes the system as active from 2011, and the two are not reconciled by any source fetched here. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, Rpeak and core count, so the tier is reported.

Timeline

2010-06 List debut at #2 (June 2010) source

Public list appearances

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

#2: TOP500, June 2010 →

Site & facility

National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen

Location: Shenzhen, China

top500.org

Where sources disagree

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

First operational / active date: 2010 (TOP500 installation year, matching its June 2010 TOP500 debut) against 2011 ("active since 2011"). No source fetched for this pass reconciles the two; first_operational_date is left blank.

Change history

2026-09-22 Added with a rank pointer on the edition where it ranked highest; first-operational date left open, sources disagree

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
en.wikipedia.org	names system and part	Intel Xeon X5650, NVIDIA Tesla C2050, Mellanox InfiniBand QDR
top500.org	names system and part	Intel Xeon X5650, NVIDIA Tesla C2050, Mellanox InfiniBand QDR

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