Supercomputers/Systems/Sunrise
United Kingdom · operational · mixed
Sunrise
Operated by UKAEA at UKAEA Culham Campus .
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
- 34.77 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 46.16 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 75.3%
- Cores
- 156,672
- Power
- 1.40 MW
- Per watt
- 24.8 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 | - Dell PowerEdge XE9785L | Dell Technologies | - | Verified | top500.orgukaea.org |
| Accelerator | AMD Instinct MI355X Accelerators 672 AMD Instinct MI355X GPU accelerators | AMD | 672 reported | Verified | ukaea.orgtop500.org |
| CPU | AMD EPYC 9575F CPUs 64C · 3.3 GHz AMD EPYC 9575F 64C 3.3GHz | AMD | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | NVIDIA InfiniBand NDR (Quantum-2) Interconnect Fat tree or dragonfly+ · 400 Gb/s per port · Under 0.6 microseconds InfiniBand NDR400 | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Storage | WEKA Data Platform Storage Parallel filesystem, software-defined WEKA HPC filesystem | WEKA | - | Reported | ukaea.org |
| Operating system | Rocky Linux Operating systems RHEL-compatible Linux, community-maintained · Downstream rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux source Rocky Linux | Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
The UK's first AI supercomputer dedicated to fusion energy research, a Dell PowerEdge XE9785L system of AMD EPYC 9575F processors and 672 AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs over InfiniBand NDR400, funded by GBP45 million from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, owned by UKAEA and operated day to day by the University of Cambridge at UKAEA's Culham Campus. UKAEA's own page also names a separate 192-node dual-socket Intel Xeon Max (Sapphire Rapids HBM, 56-core) CPU cluster alongside the GPU partition, which is not recorded here since no source gives it a distinct performance figure. UKAEA states the machine's purpose directly: combining high-fidelity simulation with physics-informed AI to build predictive digital twins for plasma turbulence, materials development and tritium fuel breeding, cutting the cost and time of physical testing. It ranked 67th on the June 2026 TOP500 list, its only appearance; that edition's list_appearances pointer budget is already full (LEGAL.md's 50-row cap), so no rank pointer is recorded and ranked is left 0 here even though the system is genuinely listed; Rmax, Rpeak and core count are taken directly from its TOP500 system page regardless. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, Rpeak and core count, so the tier is reported.
Timeline
- 2026-06 First operational source
Site & facility
Change history
- 2026-09-24 Added; ranks on TOP500 June 2026 but that edition's pointer budget is full, so no list_appearances row is recorded
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, part and count | AMD EPYC 9575F, AMD Instinct MI355X, NVIDIA InfiniBand NDR (Quantum-2), Rocky Linux · counts: 672 |
| ukaea.org | names system, part and count | AMD EPYC 9575F, AMD Instinct MI355X, WEKA Data Platform · counts: 672 |
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.