Supercomputers/Systems/Topaz
Australia · operational · mixed
Topaz
Operated by Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre at Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre .
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
- -
- Rpeak
- -
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- -
- Cores
- -
- 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 | - XENON Systems, pre-built and tested in Melbourne | XENON Systems | - | Verified | pawsey.org.auxenon.global |
| Accelerator | NVIDIA Tesla V100 Accelerators CUDA (Volta GV100) · 5,120C · 1.53 GHz · 12 nm · 300 W 22 general-purpose nodes with dual NVIDIA Tesla V100 | NVIDIA | 44 estimated | Verified | pawsey.org.auxenon.global |
| Interconnect | NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR Interconnect Fat tree or dragonfly+ · 200 Gb/s per port · About 0.6 microseconds Mellanox/NVIDIA ConnectX-6 HDR InfiniBand, 200 Gb/s | NVIDIA | - | Verified | pawsey.org.auxenon.global |
The read
A 42-node GPU and visualisation cluster built by Melbourne integrator XENON Systems to complement Pawsey's Magnus and Zeus machines: 22 general-purpose nodes with dual NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs and dual Cascade Lake Xeons, and 20 remote-visualisation nodes with NVIDIA Quadro RTX cards, tied together on Mellanox/NVIDIA ConnectX-6 HDR InfiniBand at 200 Gb/s. Pawsey's own announcement and XENON's press release independently agree on the node split and the dual-V100 configuration; XENON's is the only source for the exact interconnect part and the roughly 350 TFlop/s double-precision theoretical peak. Full production began in March 2020. It has never been submitted to TOP500.
Site & facility
Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre
- Location
- Kensington, Australia
- Commissioned
- 2022
Change history
- 2026-09-23 Added; unranked Pawsey GPU/visualisation cluster, never submitted to 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 |
|---|---|---|
| pawsey.org.au | names system and part | NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR |
| xenon.global | names system and part | NVIDIA Tesla V100, NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR |
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
Why accelerators exist, what the memory hierarchy costs, and how the CPU and accelerator merged onto one package.
The interconnect
Topologies, why latency and tail behaviour matter more than bandwidth, and how the fabric market consolidated.