Supercomputers/Systems/Altamira (Cantabria)
Spain · operational · hpc
Altamira (Cantabria)
Also known as Altamira 2; Universidad de Cantabria Altamira
Operated by University of Cantabria .
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 1581 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
- 74.39 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 79.87 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 93.1%
- Cores
- 3,840
- Power
- 79.76 kW
- Per watt
- 0.9 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.
How it compares
Ranked against the other machines in this dataset that report the same figure: those that first came into service within two years of Altamira (Cantabria), and those in Spain. Computed from our tables; a metric is ranked only when at least eight peers report it.
| Metric | Value | Against its era | Against its country |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rmax | 74.39 TFlop/s | #180 of 193 · bottom 8% | #8 of 10 · bottom 23% |
| Energy efficiency | 0.9 GF/W | #72 of 149 · top 48% | - |
| Rmax ÷ Rpeak | 93.1 % | #11 of 192 · top 5% | #1 of 9 · highest |
| Power draw | 80 kW | #145 of 151 · bottom 5% | - |
Every metric is ranked largest-first, so a high power-draw rank means a big power draw, not a good one. Rmax ÷ Rpeak uses HPL-measured results only. Rankings move as machines are added; they describe this dataset, not the world.
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 iDataPlex DX360M4 (RES: 163 iDataPlex nodes) | IBM | - | Reported | top500.orgciencia.gob.es |
| Accelerator | - Five nodes with Tesla GPUs | NVIDIA | 5 reported | Reported | ciencia.gob.es |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.6GHz | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand FDR Interconnect Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond Infiniband FDR (TOP500); RES says Infiniband QDR | Mellanox NVDANASDAQ
rolls up to NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.orgciencia.gob.es |
The read
Altamira is a node of the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES) run by the University of Cantabria's Scientific-Technical Services and installed at the Institute of Physics of Cantabria (IFCA) in Santander. The RES page says the second Altamira system was launched in October 2012, with 163 IBM iDataPlex nodes (five with Tesla GPUs), more than 7,500 cores, more than 10 TB of memory, over 50 Tflops, InfiniBand QDR and a GPFS file system over 2 PB, contributing 20 percent of its resources to RES. TOP500 lists an IBM iDataPlex DX360M4 with Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.6 GHz and InfiniBand FDR at 3,840 cores, 74.39 TFlop/s Rmax, 79.87 TFlop/s Rpeak and 79.76 kW, 358th in June 2012 (its only list); the TOP500 and RES figures for nodes, cores, fabric and launch date do not agree and are not reconciled here. RES later replaced it with a different machine.
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
- 2026-10-18 Altamira (Cantabria) added from its source pages
Nearby in scale
The machines closest to Altamira (Cantabria) by Rmax, smaller to larger.
- Anselm · Czechia, decommissioned · 0.07 PFlop/s
- Dawson2 (UCLA) · USA, operational · 0.07 PFlop/s
- BuTinah · United Arab Emirates, decommissioned · 0.07 PFlop/s
- Louhi · Finland, operational · 0.08 PFlop/s
- Colosse · Canada, operational · 0.08 PFlop/s
- T2K Tsukuba · Japan, decommissioned · 0.08 PFlop/s
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.