VIP (Garching)

Also known as RZG IBM Power 575 POWER6

Researched with AI assistance, checked by scripts. These rows were researched by AI agents reading public operator, laboratory and vendor sources, appended by scripts and checked by automated validation; no subject-matter expert has reviewed them (how this site is made). A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1350 of 1540 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 64 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: 80.32 TFlop/s
Rpeak: 126.34 TFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 63.6%
Cores: 6,720
Power: 1.07 MW
Per watt: 0.1 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 Power 575 cluster, POWER6 4.7 GHz	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	top500.org mpg.de
CPU	- IBM POWER6 4.7 GHz, more than 6,600 processors per Max Planck release, 6,720 cores in TOP500	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	mpg.de top500.org
Operating system	IBM AIX Operating systems Unix (System V-derived) · Proprietary AIX	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	top500.org

The read

IBM Power 575 system of POWER6 processors at the Max Planck computing centre in Garching (then RZG, now MPCDF), listed by TOP500 under the site name MPI/IPP. The Max Planck Society's 28 April 2008 release describes more than 6,600 POWER6 processors and a theoretical peak above 125 TFlop/s, replacing the Power4-based HMPG-2 that was Germany's most powerful machine in 2002, a rise in computing power by a factor above 30 for a threefold rise in energy use, and planned work on cosmology, plasma turbulence for ITER and nanoscale simulation. The same release says the Blue Gene/P began installation in September 2007 (see genius-mpcdf). TOP500 lists 6,720 cores of 4.7 GHz POWER6 on InfiniBand under AIX with a stated 1,073 kW; Rmax was 80.32 TFlop/s at 20th in June 2008, 92.98 at 24th in November 2008 and 98.24 at 33rd in June 2009, its last list. The figures recorded here are the first entry. The release counts processors where TOP500 counts cores, and the 6,600 and 6,720 figures are treated as the same machine; nodes, cooling and price are not stated in the release.

Timeline

2008 First operational source
2008-04 Announced source
2008-06 List debut at #20 (June 2008) source

Public list appearances

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

#20: TOP500, June 2008 →

Site & facility

MPCDF Garching

Location: Garching, Germany
Commissioned: 2021

mpcdf.mpg.de top500.org

Change history

2026-10-17 VIP (Garching) added from its source pages

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.

Every source cited on this page was readable, and none of them mentions this system. They are cited at page granularity, normally because no stable deep link could be found. That is a real weakness in this row and it is why the system carries a confidence tier below verified. See how this check works.

Cited source	Result	Found on the page
mpg.de	does not name this system	-
top500.org	does not name this system	-

Checked 2026-10-18 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.