Supercomputers/Systems/Narwhal
USA · operational · hpc
Narwhal
Operated by Navy DSRC at Navy DSRC (Stennis Space Center) .
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: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 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
- 8.02 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 11.50 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 69.7%
- Cores
- 276,480
- 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 | - HPE Cray system | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | AMD EPYC 7H12 (Rome, high frequency) CPUs x86-64 · 64C · 2.6 GHz · 7 nm · 280 W AMD EPYC 7H12 64C 2.6GHz | AMD | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | HPE Slingshot-10 Interconnect Dragonfly · 100 Gb/s per port Slingshot-10 | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
HPE Cray system at the US Navy DoD Supercomputing Resource Center, part of the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP). TOP500 lists AMD EPYC 7H12 64C 2.6GHz processors over Slingshot-10, installed 2020, with Rmax 8.02 PFlop/s, Rpeak 11.50 PFlop/s and 276,480 cores; it first appeared on the June 2021 list at rank 53. ExecutiveGov reports the Navy upgraded Narwhal to 13.6 petaFLOPS in 2023 alongside the new Nautilus system, a figure this dataset does not record since TOP500 has not re-benchmarked the upgraded configuration. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, Rpeak and core count, so the tier is reported.
Timeline
- 2021-06 List debut at #53 (June 2021) source
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
Navy DSRC (Stennis Space Center)
- Location
- Stennis Space Center, MS, USA
Change history
- 2026-10-01 Added Narwhal (Navy DSRC)
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 |
|---|---|---|
| executivegov.com | names system only | - |
| top500.org | names system and part | AMD EPYC 7H12 (Rome, high frequency), HPE Slingshot-10 |
Checked 2026-10-09 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.