Supercomputers/Systems/QPACE (Wuppertal)
Germany · operational · hpc
QPACE (Wuppertal)
Also known as QPACE SFB TR Cluster Wuppertal; QPACE1 Wuppertal
Operated by University of Wuppertal .
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
- 44.50 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 55.71 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 79.9%
- Cores
- 4,608
- Power
- 57 kW
- Per watt
- 0.8 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 | - IBM integrated the QPACE racks at its Boeblingen lab before deployment at Wuppertal | IBM | - | Reported | top500.orgarxiv.org |
| Accelerator | IBM PowerXCell 8i Accelerators Cell BE (PPE + 8 SPE) · 9C · 3.2 GHz · 65 nm · 92 W IBM PowerXCell 8i 3.2 GHz processors, the compute engine of each QPACE node | IBM | - | Verified | top500.orgarxiv.org |
The read
The University of Wuppertal installation of the original QPACE lattice QCD machine of IBM PowerXCell 8i processors on a custom 3D torus network. The collaboration's paper (arXiv 0911.2174) reports that deployment at Wuppertal and at the Julich Supercomputing Centre was completed in August 2009, four racks at each site. TOP500 lists the Wuppertal entry (QPACE SFB TR Cluster, PowerXCell 8i 3.2 GHz, 3D torus) at 4,608 cores, 44.50 TFlop/s Rmax, 55.71 TFlop/s Rpeak and 57 kW, 112th in November 2009, 133rd in June 2010, 211th in November 2010 and 408th in June 2011, its last list; the status date is that last appearance. As for Julich, the paper's per-rack peak implies a larger figure for four racks than TOP500's entry, so the tier is reported. The Julich machine is recorded as QPACE (Julich) and QPACE2 separately.
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 QPACE (Wuppertal) 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 |
|---|---|---|
| arxiv.org | names system and part | IBM PowerXCell 8i |
| top500.org | names system and part | IBM PowerXCell 8i |
Checked 2026-10-13 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.