Supercomputers/Systems/WestGrid Glacier
Canada · operational · hpc
WestGrid Glacier
Also known as Glacier (UBC/TRIUMF WestGrid cluster)
Operated by WestGrid .
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
- 3.75 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 6.17 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 60.9%
- Cores
- 1,008
- 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 | - IBM BladeCenter blades, 14 per crate, 36 crates | IBM | 504 reported | Reported | top500.orgtwist.triumf.ca |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon 3.06 GHz dual-processor blades, 1,008 CPUs | Intel | 1,008 reported | Reported | top500.orgtwist.triumf.ca |
The read
IBM BladeCenter Linux cluster of the WestGrid consortium at the University of British Columbia computing centre in Vancouver. A January 2004 TRIUMF presentation for an NSERC review (TWIST experiment) describes compute nodes as dual 3.06 GHz Xeon blades with 2 GB RAM and 80 GB disk, 14 blades per crate, 36 crates, 1,008 CPUs, three head nodes, four NFS servers with a 10 TB disk array and a 30 TB Tivoli tape archive. It records the purchase order at the end of June 2003, renovations of the UBC machine room, insufficient power supplies that left 144 blades out of service at first, beta-user access from October 2003 and early NFS freezing problems. The same slides list WestGrid's other facilities: Nexus (Edmonton, 256-processor SGI 3900) and Lattice (Calgary, 144-processor HP Alpha SC45). TOP500 lists IBM, 1,008 Xeon 3.06 GHz cores on Gigabit Ethernet under Linux, first at rank 58 in November 2003 (Rmax 1,731.9 GFlop/s), then rank 38 in June 2004 and 54 in November 2004 at Rmax 3,755 GFlop/s, Rpeak 6,168.96 GFlop/s (https://www.top500.org/system/173381/). The figures recorded are the June 2004 best run; the first operational month is the beta-access month.
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
- 2026-10-17 Added WestGrid Glacier
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 |
|---|---|---|
| twist.triumf.ca | names system only | - |
| top500.org | names system only | - |
Checked 2026-10-18 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.