Supercomputers/Systems/Airbus HP PODs
France · operational · hpc
Airbus HP PODs
Operated by Airbus .
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: 1263 of 1345 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 56 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
- 243.90 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 296.11 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 82.4%
- Cores
- 24,192
- 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 | - HP Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD) containers with HP ProLiant blade servers (then HP) | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Verified | top500.orgrdworldonline.com |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon X5675 6C 3.06GHz, 24,192 cores | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR Interconnect Fat tree · 40 Gb/s per 4x port InfiniBand QDR | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Cooling | - water-cooled HP POD containers, PUE 1.25 per HP | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | rdworldonline.com |
The read
Airbus's 2011 pair of containerised HP Performance Optimized Datacenters (PODs), delivered to Airbus sites in Toulouse, France and Hamburg, Germany. HP's announcement, as published by R&D World on 6 October 2011, says 2,016 clustered HP ProLiant BL280 G6 blades across the two 12-metre containers, a PUE of 1.25 and water cooling, and that the deployment ranked 29th on the June 2011 TOP500; TOP500 lists the same ranking with 24,192 Xeon X5675 6C 3.06GHz cores on InfiniBand QDR at 243.9 TFlop/s Rmax and 296.11 TFlop/s Rpeak (TOP500 labels the blades BL260c G6, HP's release says BL280 G6). It last appeared at rank 421 on November 2015, which is the basis for the status date. Distinct from Airbus HPC4 and Airbus HPC6.
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 Airbus HP PODs
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 |
| rdworldonline.com | names system only | - |
Checked 2026-10-13 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.