Supercomputers/Systems/Wilkes
United Kingdom · decommissioned · hpc
Wilkes
Also known as Wilkes I, Cambridge HPCS GPU cluster
Operated by University of Cambridge .
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
- 239.90 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 332.66 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 72.1%
- Cores
- 4,864
- 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 | - Dell T620 cluster | Dell Technologies | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Accelerator | - NVIDIA Tesla K20c GPUs, 256 across 128 nodes | NVIDIA | 256 reported | Reported | top500.orgcsd3.cam.ac.uk |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon E5-2630v2 6C 2.6 GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond Infiniband FDR | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
University of Cambridge's GPU cluster of 128 Dell T620 nodes with 256 NVIDIA K20c Tesla GPUs and Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon E5-2630v2 CPUs on InfiniBand FDR. Cambridge records it as second on the Green500 and the most energy-efficient air-cooled cluster in the world. TOP500 lists it 167th on the November 2013 list with 239.9 TFlop/s Rmax and 4,864 cores.
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
- 2026-10-02 Added Wilkes, Cambridge's K20 GPU 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 |
|---|---|---|
| csd3.cam.ac.uk | names system only | - |
| top500.org | names system and part | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR |
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.