Exponential growth of supercomputers performance, based on data from top500.org site. The
y-axis shows performance in GFLOPS. The red line denotes the fastest supercomputer in the world at the time. The yellow line denotes supercomputer no. 500 on TOP500 list. The dark blue line denotes the total combined performance of supercomputers on TOP500 list.
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 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.
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:[2][3]
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 2012, the fastest system, the Titan with Rpeak[4] of 27.1125 PFlop/s, is over 206,965 times faster than the fastest system in November 1993, the Connection Machine CM-5/1024 (1024 cores) with Rpeak of 131.0 GFlop/s.[5]
Top 10 ranking
The following table gives the Top 10 positions of the 40th TOP500 List released on November 12, 2012.|
| 1 | 17.590
27.113 | Titan | Cray XK7
16 core AMD Opteron CPU + Nvidia K20 GPU, Custom | Cray | Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee
 United States, 2012 | Cray Linux Env (SuSE based) |
|---|
| 2 | 16.325
20.133 | Sequoia | Blue Gene/Q
PowerPC A2, Custom | IBM | Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
United States, 2011 | Linux (RHEL and CNK) |
|---|
| 3 | 10.510
11.280 | K computer | RIKEN
SPARC64 VIIIfx, Tofu | Fujitsu | RIKEN
 Japan, 2011 | Linux |
|---|
| 4 | 8.162
10.066 | Mira | Blue Gene/Q
PowerPC A2, Custom | IBM | Argonne National Laboratory
United States, 2012 | Linux (RHEL and CNK) |
|---|
| 5 | 4.141
5.033 | JUQUEEN | Blue Gene/Q
PowerPC A2, Custom | IBM | Forschungszentrum Jülich
 Germany, 2012 | Linux (RHEL and CNK) |
|---|
| 6 | 2.897
3.185 | SuperMUC | iDataPlex DX360M4
Xeon E5–2680, Infiniband | IBM | Leibniz-Rechenzentrum
Germany, 2012 | Linux |
|---|
| 7 | 2.660
3.959 | Stampede | iDataPlex DX360M4
Xeon E5–2680, Infiniband | Dell | Texas Advanced Computing Center
United States, 2012 | Linux |
|---|
| 8 | 2.566
4.701 | Tianhe-1A | NUDT YH Cluster
Xeon 5670 + Tesla 2050, Arch[6] | NUDT | National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin
 China, 2010 | Linux |
|---|
| 9 | 1.725
2.097 | Fermi | Blue Gene/Q
PowerPC A2, Custom | IBM | CINECA
 Italy, 2012 | Linux (RHEL and CNK) |
|---|
| 10 | 1.515
1.944 | DARPA Trial Subset | Power 775, Custom | IBM | IBM Development Engineering
United States, 2012 | 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 christened by its 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
Systems ranked #1 since 1993
- Cray Titan ( United States, November 2012 - present)
- IBM Sequoia Blue Gene/Q ( United States, June 2012 – November 2012)
- Fujitsu K computer ( Japan, June 2011 – June 2012)
- NUDT Tianhe-1A ( China, November 2010 – June 2011)
- Cray Jaguar ( United States, November 2009 – November 2010)
- IBM Roadrunner ( United States, June 2008 – November 2009)
- IBM Blue Gene/L ( United States, November 2004 – June 2008)
- NEC Earth Simulator ( Japan, June 2002 – November 2004)
- IBM ASCI White ( United States, November 2000 – June 2002)
- Intel ASCI Red ( United States, June 1997 – November 2000)
- Hitachi CP-PACS ( Japan, November 1996 – June 1997)
- Hitachi SR2201 ( Japan, June 1996 – November 1996)
- Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel ( Japan, November 1994 – June 1996)
- Intel Paragon XP/S140 ( United States, June 1994 – November 1994)
- Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel ( Japan, November 1993 – June 1994)
- TMC CM-5 ( United States, June 1993 – November 1993)
Number of systems
By number of systems as of June 2012:[7]
- Top processor architectures
- Top vendors
- Top regions
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 are not included: such as RIKEN MDGRAPE-3.
See also
References
External links
