Supercomputers/Systems/SuperMUC
Germany · decommissioned · hpc
SuperMUC
Operated by LRZ at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Garching .
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
- 2.90 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 3.19 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 91.0%
- Cores
- 147,456
- Power
- 3.42 MW
- 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 System x iDataPlex dx360 M4 | IBM | - | Verified | top500.orgdoku.lrz.de |
| CPU | Intel Xeon E5-2680 CPUs x86-64 · 8C · 2.7 GHz · 32 nm · 130 W Xeon E5-2680 8C 2.7GHz | Intel | - | Verified | top500.orgdoku.lrz.de |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond InfiniBand FDR, non-blocking tree within islands | NVIDIA | - | Verified | top500.orgdoku.lrz.de |
| Storage | IBM Spectrum Scale ESS (GPFS) Storage Parallel filesystem (GPFS), erasure-coded declustered RAID · 250 PB on Summit (Alpine) · About 2.5 TB/s IBM GPFS, 12 PB, about 250 GB/s aggregate throughput | IBM | - | Reported | doku.lrz.de |
| Cooling | Direct liquid cooling, warm water Cooling Direct-to-chip cold plates, facility water loop · Removes 90+ percent of node heat to liquid High Temperature Liquid Cooling, inlet water up to 40C, heat reused for building heating | IBM | - | Reported | doku.lrz.de |
| Operating system | SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Operating systems Linux distribution · Open source, commercial support subscription SUSE Linux Enterprise Server | SUSE | - | Reported | doku.lrz.de |
The read
LRZ's IBM System x iDataPlex dx360 M4, fourth on the June 2012 TOP500 and Europe's fastest machine at the time. LRZ's own decommissioned-systems page and TOP500 independently name IBM as builder and InfiniBand FDR as the fabric, so those two edges are verified; Rmax, Rpeak and core count come from TOP500 alone. LRZ's page frames SuperMUC as two co-running installation phases with a combined peak above 6.8 PFlop/s and gives 'end of 2019' as the retirement point for the whole complex, which this row and the Phase 2 row both use. Its high-temperature direct water cooling, run at inlet temperatures up to 40C so the building could reuse the heat, was an early production deployment of the warm-water approach nearly every flagship machine on this site now uses. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, Rpeak and core count, so the tier is reported.
Timeline
- 2012-06 List debut at #4 (June 2012) source
- 2012-06 First operational source
- 2019-12 Decommissioned source
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Garching
- Location
- Garching, Germany
- Cooling
- Direct warm-water cooling
- Commissioned
- 2006
Change history
- 2026-09-23 Added, LRZ's predecessor to SuperMUC-NG, with a rank pointer on the edition where it ranked highest
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 |
|---|---|---|
| doku.lrz.de | blocked our fetch | - |
| top500.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon E5-2680, Mellanox InfiniBand FDR |
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.