Supercomputers/Systems/Stokes
Ireland · decommissioned · hpc
Stokes
Also known as ICHEC Stokes
Operated by ICHEC .
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
- 36.56 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 40.86 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 89.5%
- Cores
- 3,840
- 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.
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 | - SGI Altix ICE 8200EX cluster, 320 compute nodes | SGI HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Verified | top500.orgweb.archive.org |
| CPU | Intel Xeon X5650 CPUs x86-64 · 6C · 2.66 GHz · 32 nm · 95 W Intel Xeon X5650 Westmere 6-core 2.66 GHz, two per node, 3,840 cores | Intel | 640 reported | Verified | top500.orgweb.archive.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand DDR Interconnect Fat tree · 20 Gb/s per 4x port · About 2 microseconds ConnectX InfiniBand DDR, two planes | NVIDIA | - | Reported | web.archive.orgtop500.org |
| Storage | Panasas ActiveScale (PanFS) Storage Object storage, blade shelves (1 director + 10 storage blades) Panasas ActiveStor 5200 cluster, 143 TB formatted, PanFS file system | Panasas | - | Reported | web.archive.org |
The read
One of the Irish Centre for High-End Computing's (ICHEC) national HPC systems before Fionn and Kay. ICHEC's own Stokes page (seen in a January 2012 web archive snapshot) describes an SGI Altix ICE 8200EX cluster of 320 compute nodes, each with two Westmere hex-core Xeon processors and 24 GB of RAM, giving 3,840 cores and 7,680 GB, on two planes of ConnectX InfiniBand DDR, with 143 TB (formatted) of Panasas ActiveStor 5200 storage. ICHEC says it was funded under the PRTLI Cycle 4 project e-INIS, with direct contributions from six Irish institutions. TOP500 lists the same machine (3,840 cores, Xeon X5650 6C 2.66 GHz, 36.56 TFlop/s Rmax, 40.86 TFlop/s Rpeak, 332nd in November 2010, its only list); the ICHEC page types the processor as E5650. ICHEC's current site files Stokes under its HPC Museum menu, without a retirement date, so the status is decommissioned with no date.
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 Stokes added, verified on TOP500 and the operator or a second source
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 |
|---|---|---|
| web.archive.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon X5650, Mellanox InfiniBand DDR, Panasas ActiveScale (PanFS) |
| top500.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon X5650, Mellanox InfiniBand DDR |
Checked 2026-10-13 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.