Supercomputers/Systems/Joliot-Curie KNL
France · decommissioned · hpc
Joliot-Curie KNL
Also known as Irene KNL; Joliot-Curie Knights Landing
Operated by CEA at Very Large Computing Centre (TGCC) .
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
- 1.31 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 2.34 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 56.0%
- Cores
- 56,304
- Power
- 326 kW
- Per watt
- 4.0 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 Joliot-Curie KNL, and those in France. 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 | 1.31 PFlop/s | #129 of 234 · bottom 46% | #31 of 52 · bottom 42% |
| Energy efficiency | 4.0 GF/W | #46 of 158 · top 29% | #17 of 42 · top 39% |
| Rmax ÷ Rpeak | 56.0 % | #205 of 229 · bottom 12% | #49 of 51 · bottom 5% |
| Power draw | 326 kW | #115 of 161 · bottom 30% | #32 of 42 · bottom 25% |
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 | - Bull Sequana X1000 cells (first phase of Joliot-Curie) | Eviden | - | Verified | www-hpc.cea.frtop500.org |
| CPU | - 828 Intel Xeon Phi 7250 (KNL) 68-core 1.4 GHz nodes, one processor per node, 56,304 cores | Intel | 828 verified | Verified | www-hpc.cea.frtop500.org |
| Interconnect | - Bull eXascale Interconnect (BXI), listed by TOP500 as Bull BXI 1.2 | Eviden | - | Verified | www-hpc.cea.frtop500.org |
| Operating system | - bullx SCS | Eviden | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
Knights Landing partition of the GENCI-CEA Joliot-Curie machine at CEA's TGCC in Bruyeres-le-Chatel, also called Irene KNL. CEA's Joliot-Curie page describes 828 Intel Xeon Phi 7250 manycore nodes at 1.4 GHz with 68 cores each (56,304 cores), 96 GB DDR4 plus 16 GB MCDRAM per node and the Bull eXascale Interconnect (BXI), part of the first phase built from Bull Sequana X1000 cells and installed at the end of 2017, and marks the partition as stopped without giving a date. TOP500 lists the same 56,304 cores on Bull BXI 1.2 with Rmax 1.31 and Rpeak 2.34 PFlop/s at 326 kW (power measurement level 2) and 37.3 TFlop/s on HPCG; its last list was June 2020, where it ranked 465th. CEA quotes the partition's peak inconsistently, 2 PFlop/s on the Joliot-Curie page and 2.52 PFlop/s on its EXA1 page, and TOP500's 2.34 matches neither, so the TOP500 figure is kept. The sibling partitions are recorded as joliot-curie-skl (Skylake) and joliot-curie-rome (AMD Rome).
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
- 2026-10-18 Added Joliot-Curie KNL
Nearby in scale
The machines closest to Joliot-Curie KNL by Rmax, smaller to larger.
- Cobalt (CCRT) · France, operational · 1.3 PFlop/s
- NA-1 · Japan, operational · 1.3 PFlop/s
- Ansel (LLNL) · USA, operational · 1.29 PFlop/s
- Taiwania · Taiwan, decommissioned · 1.33 PFlop/s
- Cedar (SFU) · Canada, decommissioned · 1.34 PFlop/s
- Curie · France, decommissioned · 1.36 PFlop/s
Related systems
Same site
- Joliot-Curie SKL · France, decommissioned, 2017
- Joliot-Curie Rome · France, operational
- Topaze · France, operational, 2021
- Curie · France, decommissioned, 2012
Same operator
- Tera-1000-2 · France, operational, 2017
- Cobalt (CCRT) · France, operational, 2016
- Tera-1000-1 · France, operational, 2016
- CEA-HF · France, operational, 2021
- CCRT Airain · France, operational, 2012
- Alice Recoque · France, planned
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.