Supercomputers/Systems/NIMS Materials Simulator
Japan · operational · hpc
NIMS Materials Simulator
Also known as Numerical Materials Simulator (2020)
Operated by NIMS .
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
- 3.08 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 4.97 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 62.0%
- Cores
- 53,568
- Power
- 691.2 kW
- Per watt
- 4.5 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 | - HPE SGI 8600 | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Verified | top500.orghpcwire.jp |
| CPU | - Xeon Platinum 8268 24C 2.9GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Omni-Path Architecture Interconnect Fat tree · 100 Gb/s per port · About 1 microsecond Dual-rail Intel Omni-Path | Cornelis Networks | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Operating system | CentOS Operating systems Linux distribution, RHEL-compatible rebuild · Open source, community-maintained CentOS | The CentOS Project | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
HPE SGI 8600 water-cooled parallel cluster at the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba. TOP500 lists 53,568 cores of Xeon Platinum 8268 24C 2.9GHz on dual-rail Intel Omni-Path, 3.08 PFlop/s Rmax, 4.97 PFlop/s Rpeak and 691.20 kW, running CentOS; it ranked 234th in June 2023 (entry recorded here) and 388th in June 2025. NIMS procurement notices (via HPCwire Japan) show a 60-month Japan HPE rental covering 1 March 2020 to 28 February 2025 and a tender for a successor at least twice as fast; a newer Dell system carries the same name on later lists.
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
- 2026-10-02 Added NIMS Materials Simulator
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 | Omni-Path Architecture, CentOS |
| hpcwire.jp | does not name this system | - |
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.