Supercomputers/Systems/GPC (SciNet)
Canada · decommissioned · hpc
GPC (SciNet)
Also known as General Purpose Cluster
Operated by SciNet .
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
- 261.63 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 312.83 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 83.6%
- Cores
- 30,912
- Power
- 1.03 MW
- Per watt
- 0.3 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 | - IBM iDataPlex DX360M2, 3,780 nodes | IBM | 3,780 reported | Reported | top500.orgscinethpc.ca |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon E5540 2.53 GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.orgscinethpc.ca |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR Interconnect Fat tree · 40 Gb/s per 4x port DDR and 5:1 blocked QDR InfiniBand | Mellanox NVDANASDAQ
rolls up to NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.orgscinethpc.ca |
The read
SciNet's workhorse General Purpose Cluster, installed June 2009 and decommissioned 22 April 2018. SciNet's historic-systems page describes 3,780 IBM iDataPlex DX360M2 nodes with 30,240 Xeon E5540 2.53 GHz cores and 16 GB per node, about a quarter on non-blocking DDR InfiniBand and the rest on 5:1 blocked QDR, 48-hour maximum jobs, and says it ranked 16th in the world at inception and was the fastest in Canada. TOP500 carries it from Jun 2009 to Nov 2015: 30,240 cores and 168.6 TF until Nov 2011 (rank 28 in Jun 2010), then 30,912 cores and Rmax 261.63 TF, Rpeak 312.83 TF, 1,030 kW from Jun 2012 (rank 149 in Nov 2013). SciNet and TOP500 differ on the later core count. A later SciNet flagship is niagara; the sibling SciNet systems from this era are scinet-tcs and soscip-bgq.
Timeline
- 2009-06 First operational source
- 2013-11 List debut at #149 (November 2013) source
- 2018-04-22 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
- 2026-10-17 GPC (SciNet) 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 |
|---|---|---|
| scinethpc.ca | names system and part | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR |
| top500.org | does not name this system | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR |
Checked 2026-10-18 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.