Supercomputers/Systems/QPACE (Julich)
Germany · operational · hpc
QPACE (Julich)
Also known as QPACE SFB TR Cluster Julich; QPACE1 Julich
Operated by Forschungszentrum Julich at Julich Supercomputing Centre .
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
- 44.50 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 55.71 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 79.9%
- Cores
- 4,608
- Power
- 57 kW
- Per watt
- 0.8 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 | - IBM integrated the QPACE racks at its Boeblingen lab before deployment at Julich | IBM | - | Reported | top500.orgarxiv.org |
| Accelerator | IBM PowerXCell 8i Accelerators Cell BE (PPE + 8 SPE) · 9C · 3.2 GHz · 65 nm · 92 W IBM PowerXCell 8i 3.2 GHz processors, the compute engine of each QPACE node | IBM | - | Verified | top500.orgarxiv.org |
The read
The Julich installation of the original QPACE (QCD Parallel Computing Engine), a lattice QCD machine of IBM PowerXCell 8i processors joined by a custom 3D torus network on FPGAs, built by a collaboration of Regensburg, Wuppertal, Julich and other institutes with IBM. The collaboration's paper (arXiv 0911.2174) reports deployment at the Julich Supercomputing Centre and at the University of Wuppertal completed in August 2009, four racks at each site, 26 TFlop/s per rack, with a water-cooling concept and the top place on the November 2009 Green500. TOP500 lists the Julich entry (QPACE SFB TR Cluster, PowerXCell 8i 3.2 GHz, 3D torus) at 4,608 cores, 44.50 TFlop/s Rmax, 55.71 TFlop/s Rpeak and 57 kW, 110th in November 2009, 131st in June 2010, 209th in November 2010 and 406th in June 2011, its last list. The paper's per-rack peak implies a larger figure for four racks than TOP500's entry, so the TOP500 figures may describe part of the installation; the tier is reported. TOP500 also lists a third, Regensburg entry with identical figures that no second source backs, which is not recorded. QPACE2 is recorded separately.
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
Julich Supercomputing Centre
- Location
- Julich, Germany
- Cooling
- Direct liquid cooling
- Commissioned
- 2004
Change history
- 2026-10-09 QPACE (Julich) 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 |
|---|---|---|
| arxiv.org | names system and part | IBM PowerXCell 8i |
| top500.org | names system and part | IBM PowerXCell 8i |
Checked 2026-10-13 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.