Supercomputers/Systems/Tsessebe
South Africa · decommissioned · hpc
Tsessebe
Also known as CHPC Tsessebe; Tsessebe Sun Constellation
Operated by CHPC .
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
- 61.33 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 74.26 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 82.6%
- Cores
- 6,336
- 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 | - Oracle (Sun) Sunblade X6275 blades in a Sun Constellation System | Oracle | - | Verified | top500.orgitweb.co.za |
| Integrator | - Dell PowerEdge C6100 servers added to the cluster | Dell Technologies | - | Verified | itweb.co.zatop500.org |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon X5570 4C 2.93GHz Nehalem and X5670 Westmere processors | Intel | - | Reported | top500.orgitweb.co.za |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR Interconnect Fat tree · 40 Gb/s per 4x port InfiniBand QDR interconnect | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
Sun Constellation cluster that was the Centre for High Performance Computing's national system before Lengau, described by R&D World as the first African supercomputer to rank on the TOP500. ITWeb reports the November 2011 TOP500 placing at 329th with 61 TFlop/s Linpack (up from 25 TFlop/s in October 2011) and 74 TFlop/s theoretical peak, built from Oracle Sunblade X6275 blades with Intel Nehalem 8-core and Westmere 12-core processors plus Dell PowerEdge C6100 servers with Westmere 12-core processors; TOP500 lists 6,336 cores of Xeon X5570 4C 2.93GHz on InfiniBand QDR, Rmax 61.33 and Rpeak 74.26 TFlop/s, first ranked 313th in November 2009 and last 497th in June 2012. The Next Platform describes the cluster as arriving in 2009 with 24.9 TFlop/s, later grown to 64.4 TFlop/s with Sun and Dell additions on 40 Gb/s InfiniBand. CHPC's own news item on repurposing a rack for the Ghana SKA readiness project calls it the decommissioned Tsessebe supercomputer; no decommissioning date was found.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Change history
- 2026-10-09 Added Tsessebe at CHPC
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 | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR |
| itweb.co.za | 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.