Supercomputers/Systems/BlueCrystal
United Kingdom · operational · hpc
BlueCrystal
Also known as University of Bristol BlueCrystal
Operated by University of Bristol .
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
- 28.78 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 37.63 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 76.5%
- Cores
- 3,360
- Power
- 135 kW
- Per watt
- 0.2 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 with IBM built the system (TOP500: ClusterVision/IBM) | ClusterVision | - | Reported | top500.orgbristol.ac.uk |
| Integrator | - IBM xSeries x3450 servers | IBM | - | Reported | top500.orgbristol.ac.uk |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon E5462 quad-core 2.8 GHz, 3,360 cores | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
The University of Bristol's BlueCrystal cluster, opened in May 2008 as a 7 million pound facility built by ClusterVision, IBM and ClearSpeed that the university said could do more than 37 trillion calculations a second. TOP500 lists it as an IBM xSeries x3450 cluster of Xeon E5462 quad-core 2.8 GHz processors on InfiniBand, 3,360 cores, 28.78 TFlop/s Rmax, 37.63 TFlop/s Rpeak and 135 kW running Linux, ranked 67th in June 2008, 87th, 175th, 240th and 378th in June 2010 (its last list). The university's separate documentation describes a smaller Opteron-based Phase 1 (92 standard nodes); this record covers only the Xeon system that TOP500 lists, and the university's phase numbering for it is not established here.
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 BlueCrystal
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 |
|---|---|---|
| bristol.ac.uk | names system only | - |
| top500.org | names system only | - |
Checked 2026-10-13 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.