Supercomputers/Systems/NSC Monolith
Sweden · operational · hpc
NSC Monolith
Also known as Monolith (NSC Linkoping)
Operated by NSC .
Researched with AI assistance, checked by scripts. These rows were researched by AI agents reading public operator, laboratory and vendor sources, appended by scripts and checked by automated validation; no subject-matter expert has reviewed them (how this site is made). A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1350 of 1540 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 64 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
- 1.13 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 1.76 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 64.3%
- Cores
- 400
- 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 | - Self-made Pentium Xeon cluster, 200 dual-processor nodes | NSC | - | Reported | top500.orgnsc.liu.se |
| CPU | - Intel Pentium 4 Xeon 2.2 GHz, 400 processors in 200 dual nodes | Intel | 400 reported | Reported | top500.orgnsc.liu.se |
| Interconnect | - SCI 3-D torus | NSC | - | Reported | top500.orgnsc.liu.se |
The read
Dual-Xeon Linux cluster with an SCI 3-D torus interconnect at the National Supercomputer Centre (NSC) at Linkoping University, listed by TOP500 as a self-made 400-core Pentium Xeon 2.2 GHz system, Rmax 960.4 GFlop/s at its November 2002 debut (rank 51) and 1,132 GFlop/s from November 2003, against Rpeak 1,760 GFlop/s; it fell to rank 311 by November 2004 (https://www.top500.org/system/173286/). NSC's history page lists Monolith among its 2002 'Generation II' clusters, says it became the main academic resource at NSC in 2003 and started the era of Linux commodity clusters there, and that it was replaced by Neolith in 2007 (neolith in this dataset). A 2003 NSC workshop talk describes Monolith as 200 job nodes plus login and IO nodes, dual Intel Xeon nodes with fast SCI interconnect, in the same 'Monolith class' as Bris (18 job nodes, for SMHI) and Maxwell (40 job nodes, for Saab) (https://www.nsc.liu.se/lcsc2003/presentations/kjallstrom/text2.html). The 200 dual-processor nodes match the 400 TOP500 cores. The retirement date was taken only from the history page's replacement year, so status is held as of the last list appearance.
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
- 2026-10-18 Added NSC Monolith (nsc-liu)
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.