TOP500

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 (non-distributed) most powerful known computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, the second one is presented in November at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL, a portable implementation of the High-Performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.

The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany, Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Contents

Project history

In the early 1990s, a new definition of supercomputer was needed to produce meaningful statistics. After experimenting with metrics based on processor count in 1992, the idea was born at the University of Mannheim to use a detailed listing of installed systems as the basis. Early 1993 Jack Dongarra was persuaded to join the project with his Linpack benchmark. A first test version was produced in May 1993, partially based on data available on the Internet, including the following sources:[1][2]

The information from those sources was used for the first two lists. Since June 1993 the TOP500 is produced bi-annually based on site and vendor submissions only.

Since 1993, performance of the #1 ranked position steadily grew in agreement with Moore's law, doubling roughly every 14 months. The fastest system as of November 2010 is roughly 36,000 times faster (in terms of peak Tflops) than the fastest system as of June 1993.

The systems ranked #1 since 1993

Rankings

November 2011

The following table gives the Top 10 positions of the 38th TOP500 List released on November 14, 2011.
Rank Rmax
Rpeak
(Pflops)
Name Computer
Processor cores
Vendor Site
Country, year
Operating system
1 10.510
11.2804
K computer RIKEN
88,128×8 SPARC64 VIIIfx processors
Fujitsu RIKEN
  Japan, 2011
Linux
2 2.566
4.701
Tianhe-1A NUDT YH Cluster
14,336×6 Xeon + 7168×14 NVIDIA Tesla, Arch (Proprietary)[3]
NUDT National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin
  China, 2010
Linux
3 1.759
2.331
Jaguar Cray XT5
224,162 Opteron
Cray Oak Ridge National Laboratory
  United States, 2009
Linux (CLE)
4 1.271
2.9843
Nebulae Dawning TC3600 Blade
55,680 Xeon + 64,960 Tesla, InfiniBand
Dawning National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen (NSCS)
  China, 2010
Linux
5 1.192
2.28763
TSUBAME 2.0 HP Cluster Platform 3000SL
73,278 Xeon, Tesla
NEC/HP GSIC Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology
  Japan, 2010
Linux (SLES 11)
6 1.11
1.36581
Cielo Cray XE6
142,272 Opteron
Cray Los Alamos National Laboratory
  United States, 2010
Linux (CLE)
7 1.088
1.31533
Pleiades Altix
111,104 Xeon, InfiniBand
SGI Ames Research Center
  United States, 2011
Linux
8 1.054
1.28863
Hopper Cray XE6
153,408 Opteron
Cray Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
  United States, 2010
Linux (CLE)
9 1.05
1.25455
Tera 100 Bull Bullx
138,368 Xeon, InfiniBand
Bull SA Commissariat à l'énergie atomique (CEA)
  France, 2010
Linux (XBAS)
10 1.042
1.37578
Roadrunner BladeCenter QS22/LS21
122,400 Cell/Opteron
IBM Los Alamos National Laboratory
  United States, 2009
Linux (Fedora 9)

Legend

See also

Computer Science portal
Information technology portal

References

External links