Updated daily
News
What happened, and which part of the graph it happened to. Every item links out to a primary source and links in to the systems, parts and companies it concerns, so a corporate move shows up on the affected company's page, and an export-control action shows up on the machines it constrained.
Every summary here is ours. We record a headline, an attributed link to the source, and a note written for this site. We do not reproduce anyone else's article text: the link is where you read their words. Items proposed by the daily routine are marked unreviewed until someone has read the source and written the note.
2024
- Milestone ver
El Capitan verified as the fastest system in the world
LLNL confirms the MI300A-based system past 1.7 EFlop/s, making it the third US exascale machine and the second built entirely on AMD silicon.
- Milestone rep
Summit retired after six years at Oak Ridge
The retirement removes the largest remaining block of IBM POWER installed base from the graph in a single step, which is visible as a discontinuity on any CPU-architecture share chart.
2023
- Milestone rep
Aurora enters service at Argonne
Eight years after contract award, following the cancellation of its original Xeon Phi design and a redesign around Ponte Vecchio. The longest announcement-to-first-light gap in this dataset.
2022
- Facility rep
LUMI enters service in Kajaani with a reported PUE near 1.03
Hydroelectric supply and waste heat sold into the municipal district heating network. The clearest facility-layer story in the European fleet.
- Milestone rep
Frontier becomes the first system measured past one exaflop
Every part of the compute node came from a single supplier, with HPE providing the cabinet, fabric and storage. Two companies account for essentially the whole machine.
2021
- Policy rep
Phytium added to the US Entity List
Extends the substitution question from accelerators to the host CPU: Phytium's Arm server parts are the domestic option underneath the Tianhe line.
2020
- Milestone rep
Fugaku takes the top position with no accelerators
158,976 A64FX nodes, on-package HBM, and the Tofu fabric integrated onto the processor die. The shortest bill of materials of any modern leadership system.
- Corporate ver
NVIDIA completes its acquisition of Mellanox
Together with HPE's acquisition of Cray seven months earlier, this ended the last two large independent fabric businesses and made accelerator share and interconnect share dependent variables.
- Corporate rep
Cornelis Networks takes over Omni-Path from Intel
The only case in this dataset of a fabric outliving its vendor's interest in it. Intel discontinued the line in 2019; it continues independently.
2019
- Corporate ver
HPE completes its acquisition of Cray
HPE becomes the corporate successor to most of the pre-2020 US supercomputing vendor base, having already absorbed SGI in 2016.
- Policy ver
Sugon, NRCPC and Hygon added to the US Entity List
The action covered the Sunway designer, a major Chinese integrator, and the AMD x86 licensee, closing several import paths at once and setting up the domestic substitution visible in later systems.
2015
- Policy ver
NUDT and the Chinese national supercomputing centres added to the Entity List
Blocked the planned Xeon Phi upgrade to Tianhe-2. The 2018 rebuild replaced the American accelerators with NUDT's own Matrix-2000 and the machine got faster.
RSS feed · News is cross-referenced onto system and company pages automatically, so Tianhe-2 carries the export-control items that constrained it.