TOP500

Distribution of the top 500 supercomputers among different countries as of June 2014

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful (non-distributed) 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, and 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,^[1] a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.

The TOP500 list is compiled by Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (and, from 1993 until his death in 2014, Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany.)

History

Rapid growth of supercomputers performance, based on data from top500.org site. The logarithmic y-axis shows performance in GFLOPS.

  Combined performance of 500 largest supercomputers

  Fastest supercomputer

  Supercomputer on 500th place

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:^[2][3]

• "List of the World's Most Powerful Computing Sites" maintained by Gunter Ahrendt^[4]
• David Kahaner, the director of the Asian Technology Information Program (ATIP),^[5] in 1992 had published a report titled "Kahaner Report on Supercomputer in Japan"^[3] which had an immense amount of data.

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 has steadily grown in agreement with Moore's law, doubling roughly every 14 months. As of November 2014, the fastest system, the Tianhe-2 with Rpeak^[6] of 54.9024 PFLOPS, is over 419,102 times faster than the fastest system in November 1993, the Connection Machine CM-5/1024 (1024 cores) with Rpeak of 131.0 GFLOPS.^[7]

Architecture and operating systems

As of November 2014, TOP500 supercomputers are mostly based on x86-64 CPUs (Intel EMT64 and AMD AMD64 instruction set architecture), with these few exceptions (all RISC-based), 39 supercomputers based on Power Architecture used by IBM POWER microprocessors, three SPARC (including two Fujitsu/SPARC-based, one of which surprisingly made the top in 2011 without a GPU, currently ranked fourth), and one ShenWei-based (ranked 11 in 2011, ranked 65th in November 2014) making up the remainder. Prior to the ascendance of 32-bit x86 and later 64-bit x86-64 in the early 2000s, a variety of RISC processor families made up the majority of TOP500 supercomputers, including RISC architectures such as SPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC and Alpha.

In recent years heterogeneous computing, mostly using Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPU) as coprocessors, has become a popular way to reach a better performance per watt ratio and higher absolute performance; almost required for good performance and to make the top (or top 10), with some exceptions, such as the mentioned SPARC computer without any coprocessors. Then an x86-based coprocessor, Xeon Phi, has also been used.

Share of processor architecture families in TOP500 supercomputers by time trend.

All the fastest supercomputers in the decade since the Earth Simulator supercomputer, have used a Linux-based operating system. As of November 2014, 485 or 97% of the world's fastest supercomputers use the Linux kernel Remaining 3% run some Unix variant (which is AIX for all of them except one), with one supercomputer running Windows and one with a "mixed" operating system.^[8] Within those 97% are the most powerful supercomputers including those ranking as the top ten.

Since November 2014, Windows Azure^[9] cloud computer is no longer on the list of fastest supercomputers (its best rank was 165 in 2012), leaving the Shanghai Supercomputer Center's "Magic Cube" as the only Windows-based supercomputer, running Windows HPC 2008 and ranked 360 (its best rank was 11 in 2008).^[10]

Top 10 ranking

Top 10 positions of the 44th TOP500 on November, 2014

Rank	Rmax Rpeak (PFLOPS)	Name	Computer design Processor type, interconnect	Vendor	Site Country, year	Operating system
1	33.863 54.902	Tianhe-2	NUDT Xeon E5–2692 + Xeon Phi 31S1P, TH Express-2	NUDT	National Supercomputing Center in Guangzhou   China, 2013	Linux (Kylin)
2	17.590 27.113	Titan	Cray XK7 Opteron 6274 + Tesla K20X, Cray Gemini Interconnect	Cray Inc.	Oak Ridge National Laboratory   United States, 2012	Linux (CLE, SLES based)
3	17.173 20.133	Sequoia	Blue Gene/Q PowerPC A2, Custom	IBM	Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory   United States, 2013	Linux (RHEL and CNK)
4	10.510 11.280	K computer	RIKEN SPARC64 VIIIfx, Tofu	Fujitsu	RIKEN   Japan, 2011	Linux
5	8.586 10.066	Mira	Blue Gene/Q PowerPC A2, Custom	IBM	Argonne National Laboratory   United States, 2013	Linux (RHEL and CNK)
6	6.271 7.779	Piz Daint	Cray XC30 Xeon E5–2670 + Tesla K20X, Aries	Cray Inc.	Swiss National Supercomputing Centre    Switzerland, 2013	Linux (CLE)
7	5.168 8.520	Stampede	PowerEdge C8220 Xeon E5–2680 + Xeon Phi, Infiniband	Dell	Texas Advanced Computing Center   United States, 2013	Linux (CentOS)[11]
8	5.008 5.872	JUQUEEN	Blue Gene/Q PowerPC A2, Custom	IBM	Forschungszentrum Jülich   Germany, 2013	Linux (RHEL and CNK)
9	4.293 5.033	Vulcan	Blue Gene/Q PowerPC A2, Custom	IBM	Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory   United States, 2013	Linux (RHEL and CNK)
10	3.577 6.132		Cray CS Xeon E5-2660v2 10C and Nvidia K40, Infiniband	Cray Inc.	United States, 2014	Linux

Legend:

• Rank – Position within the TOP500 ranking. In the TOP500 list table, the computers are ordered first by their Rmax value. In the case of equal performances (Rmax value) for different computers, the order is by Rpeak. For sites that have the same computer, the order is by memory size and then alphabetically.
• Rmax – The highest score measured using the LINPACK benchmark suite. This is the number that is used to rank the computers. Measured in quadrillions of floating point operations per second, i.e. petaflops.
• Rpeak – This is the theoretical peak performance of the system. Measured in PFLOPS.
• Name – Some supercomputers are unique, at least on its location, and are therefore named by their owner.
• Computer – The computing platform as it is marketed.
• Processor cores – The number of active processor cores actively used running LINPACK. After this figure is the processor architecture of the cores named. If the interconnect between computing nodes is of interest, it's also included here.
• Vendor – The manufacturer of the platform and hardware.
• Site – The name of the facility operating the supercomputer.
• Country – The country in which the computer is situated.
• Year – The year of installation/last major update.
• Operating system – The operating system that the computer uses.

Other rankings

Top countries

Numbers below represent the number of computers in the TOP500 that are in each of the listed countries.

Country	Nov 2014[12]	Jun 2014	Nov 2013	Jun 2013	Nov 2012	Jun 2012	Nov 2011	Jun 2011	Nov 2010	Jun 2010	Nov 2009	Jun 2009	Nov 2008	Jun 2008	Nov 2007
United States	231	233	264	252	250	252	263	255	276	280	277	291	291	258	284
EU	111	98	98	91	94	102	95	107	123	136	137	137	148	166	138
China	61	76	63	66	72	68	74	61	41	25	21	21	15	12	10
United Kingdom	30	23	29	24	25	27	27	24	38	44	43	45	52	47	49
Japan	32	30	28	30	32	35	30	26	26	18	16	15	17	22	20
France	30	27	22	23	21	22	23	25	25	29	26	23	26	34	17
Germany	26	22	20	19	19	20	20	30	26	24	27	30	25	47	31
Canada	6	9	10	9	11	10	9	8	6	7	9	8	2	2	5
India	9	9	12	11	8	5	2	2	4	5	3	6	8	6	9
Korea, South	9	8	5	4	4	3	3	4	3	1	2		1	1	1
Australia	9	6	5	5	7	6	4	6	4	1	1	1	1	1	1
Switzerland	7	6	5	4	4	1	3	4	4	5	5	4	4	6	7
Italy	3	5	5	6	7	8	4	5	6	7	6	6	11	6	6
Russia	9	5	5	8	8	5	5	12	11	11	8	4	8	8	7
Netherlands	5	4	3	2				1	2	4	3	3	3	5	6
Brazil	4	4	3	3	2	3	2	2	2	1	1		2	1	1
Saudi Arabia	4	4	3	4	3	3	3	4	6	4	5	3
Norway	3	3	3	3	3	3		1	3	2	2	2	2	2	3
Sweden	5	3	5	7	6	4	3	5	6	8	7	10	8	9	7
Belgium	1	2	1	1	1	2	1	2	2		1	1	2	2	1
Israel	2	2	2	2	1	3	3	2		1	2	1	1
Finland	3	2	2	2	3	1	1	2	1	3	2	1	1	1	5
Poland	2	2	2	3	4	5	6	5	6	5	3	4	6	3	1
Spain	2	2	2	3	2	4	3	2	3	3	6	4	6	7	9
Ireland		1	2			3	3	1	1	1	1	1	1	1
Austria	1	1	1	1	1	1	2	2	1	2	8	5
Denmark	2	1	1	1	1	1	2	2	2	3			3		1
Taiwan	1	1	1	1	3	3	2	2				1	2	3	11
Malaysia	1	1									1	1	1	2	3
Hong Kong, P.R. of China	1	1	2	1						1	1	1
Mexico					1							1	1
Slovak Republic					1	1
Singapore						1	1	2	2	1	1	1			1
South Africa						1	1			1	1		1
United Arab Emirates						1
New Zealand									5	7	8	6	4	6	1
Slovenia									1	1	1	1	1	1
Turkey										1					1
Bulgaria											1	1	1
Cyprus														1	1
Egypt														1	1
Indonesia															1
Luxembourg															1

Systems ranked #1 since 1993

• NUDT Tianhe-2A (National Supercomputing Center of Guangzhou  China, June 2013 - present)
• Cray Titan (Oak Ridge National Laboratory  United States, November 2012 - June 2013)
• IBM Sequoia Blue Gene/Q (Los Alamos National Laboratory  United States, June 2012 – November 2012)
• Fujitsu K computer (RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science  Japan, June 2011 – June 2012)
• NUDT Tianhe-1A (National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin  China, November 2010 – June 2011)
• Cray Jaguar (Oak Ridge National Laboratory  United States, November 2009 – November 2010)
• IBM Roadrunner (Los Alamos National Laboratory  United States, June 2008 – November 2009)
• IBM Blue Gene/L (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory  United States, November 2004 – June 2008)
• NEC Earth Simulator (Earth Simulator Center  Japan, June 2002 – November 2004)
• IBM ASCI White (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory  United States, November 2000 – June 2002)
• Intel ASCI Red (Sandia National Laboratories  United States, June 1997 – November 2000)
• Hitachi CP-PACS (University of Tsukuba  Japan, November 1996 – June 1997)
• Hitachi SR2201 (University of Tokyo  Japan, June 1996 – November 1996)
• Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel (National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan  Japan, November 1994 – June 1996)
• Intel Paragon XP/S140 (Sandia National Laboratories  United States, June 1994 – November 1994)
• Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel (National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan  Japan, November 1993 – June 1994)
• TMC CM-5 (Los Alamos National Laboratory  United States, June 1993 – November 1993)

Number of systems

By number of systems as of November 2014:^[13]

New developments in supercomputing

In November 2014, it was announced that the United States was developing two new supercomputers to dethrone China's Tianhe-2 from its position as world's fastest supercomputer. The two computers, Sierra and Summit, will each exceed Tianhe-2's 55 peak petaflops. Summit, the more powerful of the two, will deliver 150-300 peak petaflops.^[14] On April 10th, 2015, US government agencies banned Intel Corporation from providing Xeon chips to China under the fears of nuclear research.^[15]

Large machines not on the list

A few machines that have not been benchmarked are not eligible for the list: such as NCSA's Blue Waters. Additionally purpose-built machines that are not capable or do not run the benchmark were not included: such as RIKEN MDGRAPE-3.

Computers and architectures that drop off the list

IBM Roadrunner^[16] is no longer on the list (or any other using the Cell or the PowerXCell coprocessor), but it is an example of a computer that would easily be included, if it had not been decommissioned, as it is faster than the one ranked 500th.^[17]

Conversely, a computer might drop off the list but may have been upgraded (or not) to be faster but not reported.

All Itanium based systems (including the one who reached second rank in 2004^[18])^[19] and vector processors (NEC-based such as the Earth simulator that was fastest in 2002^[20]) are also off the list.

See also

• Computer science
• Computing
• Graph500
• Green500
• HPC Challenge Benchmark
• FLOPS
• Instructions per second
• Performance per watt

References

External links

• Top500.org
• Netlib
• An Overview of High Performance Computing and Challenges for the Future on YouTube – Jack Dongarra discusses the TOP500 benchmark, its history and its trends.