Supercomputers/Systems/QB-2
USA · operational · hpc
QB-2
Also known as LONI Queen Bee 2; QB2
Operated by Louisiana State University .
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
- 1.05 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 1.47 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 71.4%
- Cores
- 23,040
- Power
- 500 kW
- Per watt
- 2.1 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 | - Dell C8220X cluster | Dell Technologies | - | Reported | top500.orghpc.lsu.edu |
| Accelerator | NVIDIA Tesla K20X Accelerators CUDA (Kepler GK110) · 2,688C · 0.732 GHz · 28 nm · 235 W NVIDIA Tesla K20x GPUs on 480 nodes | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.orghpc.lsu.edu |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon E5-2680v2 10C 2.8 GHz (Ivy Bridge-EP), two per node, 504 nodes | Intel | - | Reported | top500.orghpc.lsu.edu |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond Infiniband FDR | Mellanox NVDANASDAQ
rolls up to NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Operating system | Red Hat Enterprise Linux Operating systems Linux distribution · Open source, commercial support subscription Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 | Red Hat | - | Reported | top500.orghpc.lsu.edu |
The read
Louisiana Optical Network Infrastructure (LONI) GPU cluster, run by HPC@LSU in the Information Systems Building in Baton Rouge. LSU HPC's Spring 2019 slides list QB2 as a Dell cluster of 504 compute nodes with two 10-core 2.8 GHz Ivy Bridge-EP Xeons and 64 GB each, 480 nodes carrying NVIDIA Tesla K20x GPUs, RHEL 6, a 1,500 TFlop/s peak and a June 2018 TOP500 rank of 232. TOP500 first listed it at 47th in November 2014 (23,040 cores counting GPU cores, 1,052 TFlop/s Rmax, 1,473.6 TFlop/s Rpeak, 500 kW, FDR InfiniBand) and keeps it through June 2019 (474th). The operator is entered as LSU because HPC@LSU runs it; TOP500 names the site as the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative. Two independent organisations agree on the hardware, so the tier is verified.
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
- 2026-10-09 Added QB-2, listed on the TOP500 in 2014-11
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 | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR |
| hpc.lsu.edu | does not name this system | - |
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.