Supercomputers/Systems/Piz Kesch
Switzerland · decommissioned · hpc
Piz Kesch
Also known as Kesch; MeteoSwiss Kesch cabinet
Operated by CSCS .
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: 1263 of 1345 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 56 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
- 282.50 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 383.00 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 73.8%
- Cores
- 5,568
- 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 | - Cray CS-Storm GPU cabinet for MeteoSwiss, twelve hybrid nodes | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Verified | top500.orgcscs.ch |
| Accelerator | - NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPU devices, eight per node | NVIDIA | - | Verified | cscs.chtop500.org |
| CPU | Intel Xeon E5-2690 v3 CPUs x86-64 · 12C · 2.6 GHz · 22 nm · 135 W Intel Xeon E5-2690v3 12-core 2.6 GHz, two per node, 24 per cabinet | Intel | 24 reported | Verified | cscs.chtop500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond Mellanox FDR InfiniBand | NVIDIA | - | Verified | cscs.chtop500.org |
The read
The production cabinet of the pair of Cray CS-Storm GPU systems that CSCS ran for MeteoSwiss numerical weather prediction. CSCS names the cabinets Kesch and Escha (production and failover) and describes, for each, one water-cooled 48U rack of twelve hybrid nodes with two Xeon E5-2690v3 12-core 2.6 GHz CPUs, 256 GB of DDR4 and eight NVIDIA Tesla K80 devices per node, on Mellanox FDR InfiniBand with Cray CLFS Lustre storage; it files the pair under decommissioned systems as 2015 to 2020. TOP500 lists Piz Kesch (Cray CS-Storm, Xeon E5-2690v3 12C 2.6 GHz, Infiniband FDR, Tesla K80) with 5,568 cores, 0.2825 PFlop/s Rmax and 0.383 PFlop/s Rpeak at 353rd in November 2015, its only list. TOP500's core count does not reconcile with CSCS's node counts (12 nodes of 24 CPU cores per cabinet), so it is used as listed and the tier is reported.
Timeline
- 2015 First operational source
- 2015-11 List debut at #353 (November 2015) source
- 2020 Decommissioned source
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Change history
- 2026-10-09 Piz Kesch 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 |
|---|---|---|
| cscs.ch | names system, part and count | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR · counts: 24 |
| top500.org | names system, part and count | Intel Xeon E5-2690 v3, Mellanox InfiniBand FDR · counts: 24 |
Checked 2026-10-13 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.