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Supercomputers/Systems/Darwin III

United Kingdom · operational · hpc

Darwin III

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Also known as Cambridge Darwin III

Operated by University of Cambridge .

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
183.38 TFlop/s
HPL measured
Rpeak
202.34 TFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak
90.6%
Cores
9,728
Power
975 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.

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 Darwin III, and those in United Kingdom. Computed from our tables; a metric is ranked only when at least eight peers report it.

MetricValueAgainst its eraAgainst its country
Rmax183.38 TFlop/s#141 of 193 · bottom 28%#31 of 44 · bottom 31%
Energy efficiency0.2 GF/W#144 of 149 · bottom 4%#21 of 21 · bottom 1%
Rmax ÷ Rpeak90.6 %#29 of 192 · top 15%#6 of 44 · top 12%
Power draw975 kW#39 of 151 · top 25%#5 of 21 · top 20%

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 -
Dell PowerEdge C6220
 Dell Technologies
DELLNYSE
- Reported top500.orgcsd3.cam.ac.uk
CPU Intel Xeon E5-2670
CPUs
x86-64 · 8C · 2.6 GHz · 32 nm · 115 W
Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.6GHz
 Intel
INTCNASDAQ
- Reported top500.orgcsd3.cam.ac.uk
Interconnect Mellanox InfiniBand FDR
Interconnect
Fat tree · 56 Gb/s per 4x port · About 1 microsecond
Infiniband FDR
 Mellanox
NVDANASDAQ rolls up to NVIDIA
- Reported top500.orgcsd3.cam.ac.uk

The read

Third generation of the University of Cambridge's Darwin service, run by its HPC Service. Cambridge's history page says Darwin III arrived in 2012 as a tenfold performance step with 600 nodes, 9,600 Sandy Bridge cores and 183.38 TF, ranked 93rd on the June 2012 TOP500; it also served DiRAC2 (STFC-funded) nationally and was relocated in 2013 to free data-centre capacity, the year the Wilkes I GPU cluster (see wilkes) was added. TOP500 lists a Dell PowerEdge C6220 with Xeon E5-2670 and FDR InfiniBand, 9,728 cores, Rmax 183.38 TF, Rpeak 202.34 TF and 975 kW, and keeps it on lists through Jun 2015 (rank 433); the 128-core gap between 9,600 and 9,728 is unexplained in either source. Not to be confused with the older Darwin I and II.

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

Nearby in scale

The machines closest to Darwin III by Rmax, smaller to larger.

Same operator

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 sourceResultFound on the page
csd3.cam.ac.uknames system only-
top500.orgnames system and partIntel Xeon E5-2670, Mellanox InfiniBand FDR

Checked 2026-10-18 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.