France · decommissioned · hpc

TERA-1

Also known as CEA AlphaServer SC45

Operated by CEA at CEA/DAM .

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: 3.98 TFlop/s
Rpeak: 5.12 TFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 77.7%
Cores: 2,560
Power: -
Per watt: - 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	- HP (Compaq) AlphaServer SC45	Compaq HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Reported	top500.org www-hpc.cea.fr
CPU	DEC Alpha 21264 (EV68) CPUs Alpha · 1C · 1.25 GHz · 180 nm Alpha 1 GHz (EV68)	Digital Equipment Corporation HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	2,560 reported	Reported	top500.org www-hpc.cea.fr
Interconnect	Quadrics QsNet Interconnect Fat tree · 340 MB/s per direction · About 2 microseconds Quadrics	Quadrics	-	Reported	top500.org
Operating system	Compaq Tru64 UNIX Operating systems Unix (OSF/1-derived) · Proprietary Tru64 UNIX	Compaq HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Reported	top500.org

The read

The first step of CEA's TERA programme: a roughly 5 TFlop/s HP (Compaq) AlphaServer SC45 installed at the end of 2001 for CEA's military applications division. TOP500 lists 2,560 1 GHz Alpha cores on Quadrics under Tru64 UNIX, 3,980 GFlop/s Rmax and 5,120 GFlop/s peak, fourth on the June 2002 list and seventh on the November 2002 list (the edition recorded here), and it stayed listed until November 2006. The later Tera-100 and Tera-1000 machines descend from it. No source we fetched gives a shutdown date. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, so the tier is reported.

Timeline

2001-12 First operational source
2002-11 List debut at #7 (November 2002) source

Public list appearances

Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.

#7: TOP500, November 2002 →

Site & facility

CEA/DAM

Location: Bruyeres-le-Chatel, France
Commissioned: 2024

www-hpc.cea.fr globenewswire.com

Change history

2026-10-02 Added TERA-1, CEA's AlphaServer SC45, seventh on the November 2002 TOP500

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	does not name this system	Quadrics QsNet · counts: 2560
www-hpc.cea.fr	names system only	-

Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.