Supercomputers/Systems/Phoenix (Adelaide)
Australia · operational · hpc
Phoenix (Adelaide)
Also known as Phoenix HPC
Operated by University of Adelaide .
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
- 317.50 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 410.59 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 77.3%
- Cores
- 7,584
- Power
- 95 kW
- Per watt
- 3.3 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 | - Lenovo System x NeXtScale nx360M5 | Lenovo | - | Reported | top500.orgitnews.com.au |
| Accelerator | - NVIDIA Tesla K80 | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.orgitnews.com.au |
| CPU | Intel Xeon E5-2698 v3 CPUs x86-64 · 16C · 2.3 GHz · 22 nm · 135 W Intel Xeon E5-2698v3 16C 2.3GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond Infiniband FDR | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
The University of Adelaide's central research cluster: a Lenovo System x NeXtScale build on 16-core Xeon E5-2698v3 CPUs with NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPUs. TOP500 lists 7,584 cores, 317.5 TFlop/s Rmax, 410.6 TFlop/s Rpeak and 95 kW, ranked 439th in June 2016, with Infiniband FDR. iTnews, which reported the machine taking research workloads from 11 February 2016, quotes 3,840 cores, about 300 TFlops and a Mellanox EDR fabric; the two sources count cores and name the fabric differently and neither explains why, so the TOP500 figures are used here and the conflict is logged. A later iTnews article reported a 2017 A$1 million upgrade to about 450 TFlops. A 2025 arXiv survey of Australian institutional computing lists today's Phoenix at 11,520 Ice Lake cores, 160 nodes and 200 A100 40GB SXM GPUs, so the ranked 2016 configuration is only the first generation of a cluster that has been expanded since.
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 Phoenix, the University of Adelaide's HPC cluster
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 | Intel Xeon E5-2698 v3, Mellanox InfiniBand FDR |
| itnews.com.au | blocked our fetch | - |
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.