Rice (Purdue)

Also known as Rice

Operated by Purdue University at Purdue RCAC (West Lafayette) .

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: 407.14 TFlop/s
Rpeak: 549.12 TFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 74.1%
Cores: 13,200
Power: 726 kW
Per watt: 0.6 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	- 576 HP compute nodes (Cluster Platform DL60)	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	576 reported	Reported	top500.org top500.org
CPU	- Intel Xeon E5-2660v3 10C 2.6GHz	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org rcac.purdue.edu
Interconnect	Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond Mellanox 56 Gb/s FDR InfiniBand	Mellanox NVDANASDAQ rolls up to NVIDIA	-	Reported	top500.org rcac.purdue.edu
Storage	DDN EXAScaler Storage Lustre appliance Lustre parallel file system on DDN SFA12KX EXAScaler	DDN	-	Reported	top500.org

The read

Purdue's Rice community cluster, named for the computer scientist John R. Rice and the eighth cluster built under the university's Community Cluster Program in eight years. TOP500 News reports that more than 100 staff and volunteers assembled 576 HP compute nodes (two 10-core Xeon E5 per node, 64 GB each) on Friday 8 May, on Mellanox 56 Gb/s FDR InfiniBand with a Lustre file system on DDN SFA12KX EXAScaler storage; an atmospheric-science doctoral student was running storm simulations before it was fully unboxed. The RCAC page gives April 2015 as the installation date and 29 January 2021 as retirement, so the 8 May build day and the RCAC install date are not the same event, and only the year is recorded for the start. TOP500 lists 13,200 cores of Xeon E5-2660v3 10C 2.6 GHz, 407.14 TFlop/s Rmax, 549.12 TFlop/s Rpeak and 726 kW; 576 nodes of 20 cores would be 11,520, and the dataset records TOP500's count. Listed from June 2015 (rank 164) to November 2016 (rank 430). Tier is reported.

Timeline

2015 First operational source
2016-11 List debut at #430 (November 2016) source
2021-01-29 Decommissioned source

Public list appearances

Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.

#430: TOP500, November 2016 →

Site & facility

Purdue RCAC (West Lafayette)

Location: West Lafayette, IN, USA
Commissioned: 2022

rcac.purdue.edu

Change history

2026-10-17 Rice (Purdue) 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
rcac.purdue.edu	names system and part	Mellanox InfiniBand FDR
top500.org	names system and part	Mellanox InfiniBand FDR

Checked 2026-10-18 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.