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The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful publicly-known (that is, unclassified) computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. 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 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, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The list is updated twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputer Conference in June, the second one is presented in November at the IEEE Super Computer Conference in the USA.

The data on TOP500 was originally copied from the "List of the world's most powerful computing sites", which had been started six months earlier in January 1993 as a not for profit service. TOP500 never was as accurate, up-to-date, unbiased or detailed as the "List", but due to significant corporate sponsorship became used in various marketing materials. After ten years the "List" closed down due to the disheartening lack of recognition.

Current List (June 2006)

The following table gives the Top 10 positions of the 27th TOP500 List released during the 21st International Supercomputer Conference (ISC|06), June 27-30, 2006 in Dresden, Germany.

Rank Site/Country/Year Computer/Processors/Manufacturer Rmax/Rpeak (GFlops)
1 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
United States/2005
BlueGene/L
eServer Blue Gene Solution / 131072 (POWER)
IBM
280600/367000
2 IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
United States/2005
BGW
eServer Blue Gene Solution / 40960 (POWER)
IBM
91290/114688
3 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
United States/2005
ASC Purple
eServer pSeries p5 575 1.9 GHz / 10240 (POWER)
IBM
63390/77824
4 NASA Ames Research Center
United States/2004
Columbia
SGI Altix 1.5 GHz, Voltaire Infiniband / 10160 (Itanium)
SGI
51870/60960
5 Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique
France/2006
Tera-10
NovaScale 5160 Quadrics 1.6 GHz / 8704 (Itanium2)
Bull SA
42900/55705.6
6 Sandia National Laboratories
United States/2005
Thunderbird
PowerEdge 1850 3.6 GHz, Infiniband / 8000 (Xeon)
Dell
38270/60960
7 GSIC Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Japan/2006
TSUBAME Grid Cluster
Sun Fire X64 Cluster, 2.4/2.6 GHz, Infiniband / 10368 (Opteron)
NEC/Sun
38180/49868.8
8 Forschungszentrum Juelich
Germany/2006
JUBL
eServer Blue Gene Solution / 16384 (POWER)
IBM
37330/45875
9 Sandia National Laboratories
United States/2005
Red Storm
Red Storm Cray XT3, 2.0 GHz / 10160 (Opteron)
Cray Inc.
36190/43520
10 The Earth Simulator Center
Japan/2002
Earth Simulator / 5120 (NEC)
NEC
35860/40960

Highlights from the Top 10
Taken from the official TOP500 site:

  • Unchallenged leader remains the DOE's IBM BlueGene/L system, installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). With 280.6 TFlop/s on the Linpack benchmark it is still the only system ever to exceed the 100 TFlop/s mark.
  • Changes in the TOP10 showed three interesting newcomers, all outside the U.S., and one system upgrade.
  • The No. 3 ASC Purple system at LLNL, also built by IBM but based on the pSeries 575 servers, was slightly upgraded and reaches now 75.76 TFlop/s.
  • No. 7 is now occupied by the largest system in Japan, a cluster integrated by NEC based on Sun Fire x64 with Opteron processors and an InfiniBand interconnect, installed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
  • For the first time in the history of the TOP500 project (since 1993), the top Japanese system is not manufactured in Japan itself.

General highlights from the Top 500 since the last edition
Taken from the official TOP500 site:

  • The entry level to the list moved up to the 2.026 TFlop/s mark on the Linpack benchmark, compared to 1.646 TFlop/s six months ago.
  • The last system on the newest list was listed at position 341 in the last TOP500 just six months ago. This is a medium turnover rate for the TOP500.
  • Total accumulated performance has grown to 2.79 PFlop/s, compared to 2.30 PFlop/s six months ago and 1.69 PFlop/s one year ago.
  • The entry point for the top 100 increased in six months from 3.98 TFlop/s to 4.71 TFlop/s.

External links


  • http://www.top500.org/
  • http://www.netlib.org/benchmark/hpl/

Supercomputers | Supercomputer sites

TOP500 | TOP500

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "TOP500".

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