Supercomputers/Systems/Hrothgar
USA · operational · hpc
Hrothgar
Also known as Hrothgar Texas Tech
Operated by Texas Tech University .
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
- 68.27 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 84.54 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 80.8%
- Cores
- 7,524
- 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.
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 Hrothgar, and those in USA. 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 | 68.27 TFlop/s | #139 of 177 · bottom 23% | #259 of 332 · bottom 23% |
| Rmax ÷ Rpeak | 80.8 % | #104 of 177 · bottom 42% | #100 of 331 · top 30% |
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 cluster | Dell Technologies | - | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon X5660 6C 2.8GHz Westmere, parallel nodes; Nehalem 3.0 GHz serial nodes | Intel | - | Reported | depts.ttu.edutop500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand DDR Interconnect Fat tree · 20 Gb/s per 4x port · About 2 microseconds Infiniband DDR | Mellanox NVDANASDAQ
rolls up to NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.orgdepts.ttu.edu |
The read
Hrothgar is the Dell cluster of the Texas Tech University High Performance Computing Center. A Texas Tech CFD lab page describes 640 parallel nodes (7,680 cores) with two 2.8 GHz six-core Westmere processors and 24 GB each on DDR InfiniBand, 128 serial nodes (1,024 cores) with two 3.0 GHz Nehalem quad-cores and 16 GB on Gigabit Ethernet, 46 private nodes, 86 TFlop/s peak and a 68 TFlop/s HPL result for the parallel partition. TOP500 lists the PowerEdge cluster with Xeon X5660 2.8 GHz and InfiniBand DDR at 7,524 cores, 68.27 TFlop/s Rmax and 84.54 TFlop/s Rpeak, 111th in November 2010 down to 414th in June 2012 (four lists); the 7,524 and 7,680 core counts differ.
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 Hrothgar added from its source pages
Nearby in scale
The machines closest to Hrothgar by Rmax, smaller to larger.
- Trestles (SDSC) · USA, decommissioned · 0.07 PFlop/s
- Galera Plus · Poland, operational · 0.07 PFlop/s
- Galileu · Brazil, operational · 0.06 PFlop/s
- BuTinah · United Arab Emirates, decommissioned · 0.07 PFlop/s
- Dawson2 (UCLA) · USA, operational · 0.07 PFlop/s
- Anselm · Czechia, decommissioned · 0.07 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.