Supercomputers/Systems/Tera-10
France · decommissioned · classified
Tera-10
Also known as CEA TERA-10; NovaScale 5160
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
- 52.84 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 63.80 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 82.8%
- Cores
- 9,968
- 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 | - Bull NovaScale 5160, 544 computing nodes | Bull | 544 reported | Reported | top500.orgeetimes.com |
| CPU | - Itanium 2 Montecito dual-core 1.6 GHz, eight per node | Intel | - | Reported | top500.orgeetimes.com |
| Interconnect | Quadrics QsNet Interconnect Fat tree · 340 MB/s per direction · About 2 microseconds Quadrics QsNet II | Quadrics | - | Reported | eetimes.comtop500.org |
The read
CEA's Bull NovaScale 5160 cluster for the military applications division, the second step in the TERA programme between the 5 TFLOPS TERA-1 and the 2010 Tera-100. CEA's machine page gives Bull as builder, a 60 TFLOPS class system and a late 2005 installation. EE Times, reporting the 2006 TOP500 result, describes 544 nodes each with eight dual-core Itanium 2 Montecito processors on a Quadrics QsNet II network, 30 TB of memory and 56 I/O servers managing about a petabyte of disk. TOP500 ranks it fifth in June 2006 at 42.9 TFLOPS and seventh in November 2006 at 52.84 TFLOPS Rmax on 9,968 cores, which are the figures used here. No retirement date was found, and CEA's page does not give node counts, so the tier is reported.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
Change history
- 2026-10-02 Added Tera-10, CEA's Bull NovaScale cluster
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 and part | Quadrics QsNet |
| www-hpc.cea.fr | names system only | - |
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.