Supercomputers/Systems/Cambridge-1
United Kingdom · operational · ai training
Cambridge-1
Also known as NVIDIA Cambridge-1 DGX SuperPOD
Operated by NVIDIA at Kao Data Harlow Campus .
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
- 9.68 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 12.05 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 80.3%
- Cores
- 79,360
- 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 | - NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD reference architecture, 80 DGX A100 systems | NVIDIA | 80 reported | Verified | nvidianews.nvidia.comcomputerweekly.com |
| Accelerator | NVIDIA A100 (in DGX A100) Accelerators 640 NVIDIA A100 GPUs in 80 DGX A100 systems | NVIDIA | 640 reported | Reported | nvidianews.nvidia.comtop500.org |
| CPU | AMD EPYC 7742 (Rome) CPUs x86-64 · 64C · 2.25 GHz · 7 nm · 225 W AMD EPYC 7742 64C 2.25GHz | AMD | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR Interconnect Fat tree or dragonfly+ · 200 Gb/s per port · About 0.6 microseconds NVIDIA Mellanox InfiniBand HDR | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.orgnvidianews.nvidia.com |
The read
NVIDIA's UK supercomputer for healthcare and life-science AI, an investment NVIDIA put at about 40 million pounds. NVIDIA's announcement and Computer Weekly both state 80 DGX A100 systems on Mellanox InfiniBand, which is 640 A100 GPUs at eight per system, and Computer Weekly places it at the Kao Data campus in Harlow and dates the switch-on to 7 July 2021. TOP500 (system 179960, first listed June 2021 at rank 41 and still listed at rank 194 in June 2026) reports 79,360 cores of AMD EPYC 7742 with A100 80 GB and InfiniBand HDR, 9.68 PFlop/s Rmax and 12.05 PFlop/s Rpeak; NVIDIA's own marketing figure was 8 PFlop/s. Partners named include GSK, AstraZeneca and King's College London.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
Change history
- 2026-10-01 Added Cambridge-1 (NVIDIA)
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 |
|---|---|---|
| nvidianews.nvidia.com | names system and part | NVIDIA A100 (in DGX A100), NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR |
| computerweekly.com | could not be fetched | - |
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
Why accelerators exist, what the memory hierarchy costs, and how the CPU and accelerator merged onto one package.
The interconnect
Topologies, why latency and tail behaviour matter more than bandwidth, and how the fabric market consolidated.