Supercomputers/Systems/Bifrost
Sweden · operational · hpc
Bifrost
Also known as NSC Bifrost; SMHI Bifrost
Operated by NSC at NSC Data Centre, Linkoping .
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
- 326.47 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 426.65 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 76.5%
- Cores
- 10,256
- Power
- 205 kW
- Per watt
- 1.6 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 | - ClusterVision RS720Q/RS700 cluster (TOP500 listing) | ClusterVision | - | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon E5-2640v3 8-core 2.6 GHz, 10,256 cores in total | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR Interconnect Fat tree · 40 Gb/s per 4x port InfiniBand QDR | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Operating system | CentOS Operating systems Linux distribution, RHEL-compatible rebuild · Open source, community-maintained CentOS Linux | The CentOS Project | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
A ClusterVision cluster at the National Supercomputer Centre (NSC) in Linkoping that NSC's history page says was installed in 2015 for the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) and the MetCoOp weather collaboration, for forecasts and research. TOP500 lists a ClusterVision RS720Q/RS700 system of Xeon E5-2640v3 8-core 2.6 GHz processors on InfiniBand QDR running CentOS: 10,256 cores, 326.47 TFlop/s Rmax, 426.65 TFlop/s Rpeak and 205 kW, on three lists from June 2015 (204th) to June 2016 (424th). NSC's history page says it entered the June 2015 list at rank 203, one place away from TOP500's own table, and TOP500 is the only source for the hardware figures, so the tier is reported. The status date is its last list appearance.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
Change history
- 2026-10-09 Bifrost 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.
| Cited source | Result | Found on the page |
|---|---|---|
| nsc.liu.se | names system only | - |
| top500.org | names system and part | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR, CentOS |
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.