Supercomputers/Systems/Palmetto (Clemson)
USA · operational · hpc
Palmetto (Clemson)
Also known as Palmetto Cluster; Palmetto 1
Operated by Clemson University at Clemson IT Center .
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
- 31.06 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 38.18 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 81.4%
- Cores
- 4,096
- 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 | - 512 Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers | Dell Technologies | 512 reported | Verified | campustechnology.comtop500.org |
| CPU | - Intel quad-core Xeon E5345 2.33 GHz | Intel | - | Reported | campustechnology.comtop500.org |
| Interconnect | - Myrinet 10G | Myricom | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
Clemson University's first shared research cluster, housed at its Information Technology Center in South Carolina. Campus Technology (5 June 2008) describes 512 Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers with Intel quad-core processors, built by Dell with university researchers as a shared computing infrastructure, benchmarked at 31 teraflops with growth to 100 teraflops expected. The article does not give a core count or interconnect. TOP500 lists 4,096 cores of 2.33 GHz Xeon E5345 on Myrinet 10G, 31.06 TFlop/s Rmax and 38.18 peak, ranked 63rd in June 2008; 512 servers at 8 cores each matches that count if each is a dual quad-core node, which neither source states. Later enlargements were listed by TOP500 under separate entries that are not recorded here. A later Clemson system, Palmetto2, is in the dataset as clemson-palmetto2.
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
- 2026-10-17 Palmetto (Clemson) added from its source pages
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 |
|---|---|---|
| campustechnology.com | names system only | - |
| top500.org | names system only | - |
Checked 2026-10-18 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.