TOP500

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer

Computer

A computer is a machine that manipulates data according to a set of instructions.Although mechanical examples of computers have existed through much of recorded human history, the first electronic computers were developed in the mid-20th century . These were the size of a large room, consuming as...

 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

LINPACK

LINPACK is a software library for performing numerical linear algebra on digital computers. It was written in Fortran by Jack Dongarra, Jim Bunch, Cleve Moler, and Gilbert Stewart, and was intended for use on supercomputers in the 1970s and early 1980s...

 benchmark

Benchmark (computing)

In computing, a benchmark is the act of running a computer program, a set of programs, or other operations, in order to assess the relative performance of an object, normally by running a number of standard tests and trials against it. The term 'benchmark' is also mostly utilized for the purposes...

 for distributed-memory computers.

The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer

Hans Meuer

Hans Meuer is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Mannheim, general manager of Prometeus GmbH and general chairman of the International Supercomputing Conference...

 of the University of Mannheim

University of Mannheim

The University of Mannheim is one of the younger German universities. The University’s trademark is its distinct profile. This is characterized by Mannheim’s economic and social sciences which are closely intertwined with humanities, law, mathematics and computer science...

, Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium,...

, Jack Dongarra

Jack Dongarra

Jack J. Dongarra is a University Distinguished Professor of Computer Sciencein the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee...

 of the University of Tennessee

University of Tennessee

The University of Tennessee , sometimes called the University of Tennessee, Knoxville is a public land-grant university headquartered at Knoxville...

, Knoxville, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory conducting unclassified scientific research. It is located on the grounds of the University of California, Berkeley, in the Berkeley Hills above the central campus. It is managed and...

.

The list is updated twice a year.

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer

Computer

A computer is a machine that manipulates data according to a set of instructions.Although mechanical examples of computers have existed through much of recorded human history, the first electronic computers were developed in the mid-20th century . These were the size of a large room, consuming as...

 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

LINPACK

LINPACK is a software library for performing numerical linear algebra on digital computers. It was written in Fortran by Jack Dongarra, Jim Bunch, Cleve Moler, and Gilbert Stewart, and was intended for use on supercomputers in the 1970s and early 1980s...

 benchmark

Benchmark (computing)

In computing, a benchmark is the act of running a computer program, a set of programs, or other operations, in order to assess the relative performance of an object, normally by running a number of standard tests and trials against it. The term 'benchmark' is also mostly utilized for the purposes...

 for distributed-memory computers.

The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer

Hans Meuer

Hans Meuer is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Mannheim, general manager of Prometeus GmbH and general chairman of the International Supercomputing Conference...

 of the University of Mannheim

University of Mannheim

The University of Mannheim is one of the younger German universities. The University’s trademark is its distinct profile. This is characterized by Mannheim’s economic and social sciences which are closely intertwined with humanities, law, mathematics and computer science...

, Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium,...

, Jack Dongarra

Jack Dongarra

Jack J. Dongarra is a University Distinguished Professor of Computer Sciencein the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee...

 of the University of Tennessee

University of Tennessee

The University of Tennessee , sometimes called the University of Tennessee, Knoxville is a public land-grant university headquartered at Knoxville...

, Knoxville, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory conducting unclassified scientific research. It is located on the grounds of the University of California, Berkeley, in the Berkeley Hills above the central campus. It is managed and...

.

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.

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

University of Mannheim

The University of Mannheim is one of the younger German universities. The University’s trademark is its distinct profile. This is characterized by Mannheim’s economic and social sciences which are closely intertwined with humanities, law, mathematics and computer science...

 to use a detailed listing of installed systems as the basis. Early 1993 Jack Dongarra

Jack Dongarra

Jack J. Dongarra is a University Distinguished Professor of Computer Sciencein the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee...

 was convinced 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:

• Mannheim Supercomputer Statistics 1986-1992
• "List of the World's Most Powerful Computing Sites" maintained by Gunter Ahrendt
• David Kahaner, who 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.

The systems ranked #1 since 1993

• IBM Roadrunner (since June 2008)
• IBM Blue Gene
  Blue Gene
  Blue Gene is a computer architecture project designed to produce several supercomputers, designed to reach operating speeds in the PFLOPS range, and currently reaching sustained speeds of nearly 500 TFLOPS . It is a cooperative project among IBM Blue Gene is a computer architecture project...
  
  /L (November 2004 – June 2008)
• NEC Earth Simulator
  Earth Simulator
  The Earth Simulator was the fastest supercomputer in the world from 2002 to 2004. The system was developed for JAXA, JAERI, and JAMSTEC in 1997 for running global climate models to evaluate the effects of global warming and problems in solid earth geophysics.It has been able to run holistic...
  
   (June 2002 – November 2004)
• IBM ASCI White
  ASCI White
  ASCI White was a supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.It was a computer cluster based on IBM's commercial RS/6000 SP computer. 512 of these machines were connected together for ASCI White, with 16 processors per node and 8,192 processors in total with 6...
  
   (November 2000 – June 2002)
• Intel ASCI Red
  ASCI Red
  ASCI Red or ASCI Option Red, was a supercomputer installed at Sandia National Laboratories, located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. ASCI Red became operational in 1997 and was retired from service in September, 2005. It was the fastest computer on the TOP500 list from June 1997 to June 2000...
  
   (June 1997 – November 2000)
• Hitachi CP-PACS (November 1996 – June 1997)
• Hitachi SR2201 (June 1996 – November 1996)
• Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel (November 1994 – June 1996)
• Intel Paragon XP/S
  Intel Paragon
  The Intel Paragon was a series of massively parallel supercomputers produced by Intel. The Paragon XP/S was a productized version of the experimental Touchstone Delta system built at Caltech, launched in 1992. The Paragon superseded Intel's earlier iPSC/860 system, to which it was closely...
  
  140 (June 1994 – November 1994)
• Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel (November 1993 – June 1994)
• TMC CM-5 (June 1993 – November 1993)

List as of June 2009

The following table gives the Top 10 positions of the 33rd TOP500 List released during the ISC09 conference, June 23, 2009 in Hamburg

Hamburg

Hamburg is the second-largest city in Germany and the sixth-largest city in the European Union...

, Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium,...

.

Rank	Rmax Rpeak (Tflops FLOPS In computing, FLOPS is an acronym meaning FLoating point Operations Per Second. The FLOPS is a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating point calculations, similar to the older, simpler, instructions per second... )	Name	Computer Processor cores	Maker	Site Country, Year
1	1105.00 1456.70	Roadrunner	BladeCenter IBM BladeCenter The IBM BladeCenter is IBM's blade server architecture.-History:Originally introduced in 2002, based on engineering work started in 1999, the IBM BladeCenter was a relative late comer to the blade market. But, it differed from prior offerings in that it supported the full range of high powered x86...  QS22/LS21 129600 (Cell Cell (microprocessor) Cell is a microprocessor architecture jointly developed by Sony Computer Entertainment, Toshiba, and IBM, an alliance known as "STI". The architectural design and first implementation were carried out at the STI Design Center in Austin, Texas over a four-year period beginning March 2001 on a budget... /Opteron Opteron The Opteron is AMD's x86 server and workstation processor line, and was the first processor to implement the AMD64 instruction set architecture . It was released on April 22, 2003 with the SledgeHammer core and was intended to compete in the server and workstation markets, particularly in the same... )	IBM IBM International Business Machines Corporation, abbreviated IBM, is a multinational computer technology and IT consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, Town of North Castle, New York, United States. The company is one of the few information technology companies with a continuous history dating...	Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory, managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC , located in Los Alamos, New Mexico...  , 2008
2	1059.00 1381.40	Jaguar	Cray XT5 Cray XT5 The Cray XT5 is an updated version of the Cray XT4 supercomputer. It was launched on November 6, 2007. It includes a faster version of the XT4's SeaStar2 interconnect router called SeaStar2+, and can be configured either with XT4 compute blades, which have four dual-core AMD Opteron processor... 150152 (Opteron Opteron The Opteron is AMD's x86 server and workstation processor line, and was the first processor to implement the AMD64 instruction set architecture . It was released on April 22, 2003 with the SledgeHammer core and was intended to compete in the server and workstation markets, particularly in the same... )	Cray Cray Cray Inc. is a supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle, Washington. The company's predecessor, Cray Research, Inc. , was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray. Already a legend in his field by this time, Cray put his company on the map in 1976 with the release of the Cray-1 vector...	Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory is a multiprogram science and technology national laboratory managed for the United States Department of Energy by UT-Battelle. ORNL is the DOE's largest science and energy laboratory. ORNL is located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, near Knoxville...  , 2008
3	825.50 1002.70	JUGENE JUGENE JUGENE is a supercomputer built by IBM for the Jülich Research Centre in Germany. It is based on the Blue Gene/P and is the successor to the JUBL based on an earlier design. It was at the introduction the second fastest computer in the world and the fastest in Europe...	Blue Gene/P Solution 294912 (Power Power Architecture Power Architecture is a broad term to describe similar RISC instruction sets for microprocessors developed and manufactured by such companies as IBM, Freescale, AMCC, Tundra and P.A. Semi... )	IBM IBM International Business Machines Corporation, abbreviated IBM, is a multinational computer technology and IT consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, Town of North Castle, New York, United States. The company is one of the few information technology companies with a continuous history dating...	Jülich Research Centre Jülich Research Centre Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH is a member of the Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft or Hermann von Helmholtz Association of National Research Centres and is one of the largest interdisciplinary research centres in Europe...  , 2009
4	487.01 608.83	Pleiades Pleiades (supercomputer) Pleiades is a petascale supercomputer built by SGI at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. , it was the world's fourth fastest computer with a peak performance of more than 600 teraflops, but it was still in construction phase at that time. After further extensions, Pleiades is...	SGI Altix ICE 8200EX Altix Altix is Silicon Graphics' line of servers and supercomputers based on Intel processors. It succeeded the MIPS/IRIX-based Origin 3000 servers. The line was first announced in January 2003, with the Altix 3000 offering Intel Itanium 2 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server... 51200 (Xeon Xeon The Xeon is a brand of multiprocessing- or multi-package-capable x86 microprocessors from Intel Corporation targeted at the non-consumer server, workstation and embedded system markets.-Overview:... ), InfiniBand	SGI Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark and Abbey Silverstone...	NASA NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an agency of the United States government, responsible for the nation's public space program. NASA was established by the National Aeronautics and Space Act on July 29, 1958, replacing its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for... /Ames Research Center  , 2008
5	478.20 596.38	Blue Gene/L Blue Gene Blue Gene is a computer architecture project designed to produce several supercomputers, designed to reach operating speeds in the PFLOPS range, and currently reaching sustained speeds of nearly 500 TFLOPS . It is a cooperative project among IBM Blue Gene is a computer architecture project...	eServer Blue Gene Solution Blue Gene Blue Gene is a computer architecture project designed to produce several supercomputers, designed to reach operating speeds in the PFLOPS range, and currently reaching sustained speeds of nearly 500 TFLOPS . It is a cooperative project among IBM Blue Gene is a computer architecture project... 212992 (Power Power Architecture Power Architecture is a broad term to describe similar RISC instruction sets for microprocessors developed and manufactured by such companies as IBM, Freescale, AMCC, Tundra and P.A. Semi... )	IBM IBM International Business Machines Corporation, abbreviated IBM, is a multinational computer technology and IT consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, Town of North Castle, New York, United States. The company is one of the few information technology companies with a continuous history dating...	Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California is a scientific research laboratory founded by the University of California in 1952...  , 2007
6	463.30 607.20	Kraken	Cray XT5 Cray XT5 The Cray XT5 is an updated version of the Cray XT4 supercomputer. It was launched on November 6, 2007. It includes a faster version of the XT4's SeaStar2 interconnect router called SeaStar2+, and can be configured either with XT4 compute blades, which have four dual-core AMD Opteron processor... 66000 (Opteron Opteron The Opteron is AMD's x86 server and workstation processor line, and was the first processor to implement the AMD64 instruction set architecture . It was released on April 22, 2003 with the SledgeHammer core and was intended to compete in the server and workstation markets, particularly in the same... )	Cray Cray Cray Inc. is a supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle, Washington. The company's predecessor, Cray Research, Inc. , was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray. Already a legend in his field by this time, Cray put his company on the map in 1976 with the release of the Cray-1 vector...	National Institute for Computational Sciences National Institute for Computational Sciences -:National Institute for Computational Sciences:The National Institute for Computational Sciences is funded by the National Science Foundation and managed by the University of Tennessee. The NICS petascale scientific computing environment is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory , home to the...  , 2008
7	458.61 557.06	Intrepid	Blue Gene/P Solution 163840 (Power Power Architecture Power Architecture is a broad term to describe similar RISC instruction sets for microprocessors developed and manufactured by such companies as IBM, Freescale, AMCC, Tundra and P.A. Semi... )	IBM IBM International Business Machines Corporation, abbreviated IBM, is a multinational computer technology and IT consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, Town of North Castle, New York, United States. The company is one of the few information technology companies with a continuous history dating...	Argonne National Laboratory Argonne National Laboratory Argonne National Laboratory is one of the United States Department of Energy's oldest and largest science and engineering research national laboratories and is the largest in size in the Midwest . The laboratory is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC, which is composed of the University of Chicago and...  , 2007
8	433.20 579.38	Ranger	Sun Constellation System Sun Constellation System Sun Constellation System is an open petascale computing environment introduced by Sun Microsystems in 2007.- Main hardware components :* Sun Blade 6048 Modular System** ** * * * * - Software Stack :* OpenSolaris or Linux* Sun Grid Engine... 62976 (Opteron Opteron The Opteron is AMD's x86 server and workstation processor line, and was the first processor to implement the AMD64 instruction set architecture . It was released on April 22, 2003 with the SledgeHammer core and was intended to compete in the server and workstation markets, particularly in the same... ), Infiniband	Sun Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. is a multinational vendor of computers, computer components, computer software, and information technology services, founded on February 24, 1982...	Texas Advanced Computing Center Texas Advanced Computing Center The Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin, United States, is a research center for advanced computational science, engineering and technology....  , 2008
9	415.70 501.35	Dawn	Blue Gene/P Solution 147456 (Power Power Architecture Power Architecture is a broad term to describe similar RISC instruction sets for microprocessors developed and manufactured by such companies as IBM, Freescale, AMCC, Tundra and P.A. Semi... )	IBM IBM International Business Machines Corporation, abbreviated IBM, is a multinational computer technology and IT consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, Town of North Castle, New York, United States. The company is one of the few information technology companies with a continuous history dating...	Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California is a scientific research laboratory founded by the University of California in 1952...  , 2009
10	274.80 308.28	JUROPA	Sun Constellation System Sun Constellation System Sun Constellation System is an open petascale computing environment introduced by Sun Microsystems in 2007.- Main hardware components :* Sun Blade 6048 Modular System** ** * * * * - Software Stack :* OpenSolaris or Linux* Sun Grid Engine... 26304 (Xeon), Infiniband	Bull Groupe Bull Groupe Bull is a French-owned computer company headquartered in Les Clayes-sous-Bois, outside Paris. The company has also been known at various times as Bull General Electric, Honeywell Bull, CII Honeywell Bull, and Bull HN. Bull was founded in 1931, as H.W...	Jülich Research Centre Jülich Research Centre Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH is a member of the Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft or Hermann von Helmholtz Association of National Research Centres and is one of the largest interdisciplinary research centres in Europe...  , 2009

Legend

• Rank – Self explanatory, most powerful computer on top.
• Rmax – The highest score measured using the LINPACK
  LINPACK
  LINPACK is a software library for performing numerical linear algebra on digital computers. It was written in Fortran by Jack Dongarra, Jim Bunch, Cleve Moler, and Gilbert Stewart, and was intended for use on supercomputers in the 1970s and early 1980s...
  
   benchmark suite. This is the number which is used to rank the computers. Measured in trillions of floating point
  Floating point
  In computing, floating point describes a system for numerical representation in which a string of digits represents a rational number....
  
   operations per second
  Second
  The second , sometimes abbreviated sec., is the name of a unit of time, and is the International System of Units base unit of time...
  
  , i.e. Teraflops
  FLOPS
  In computing, FLOPS is an acronym meaning FLoating point Operations Per Second. The FLOPS is a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating point calculations, similar to the older, simpler, instructions per second...
  
  .
• Rpeak – This is the theoretical peak performance of the system. Measured in Tflops.
• 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
  Computer network
  A computer network is a group of interconnected computers. Networks may be classified according to a wide variety of characteristics. This article provides a general overview of some types and categories and also presents the basic components of a network....
  
   between computing nodes is of interest, it's also included here.
• Maker – 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 the supercomputer went online. Since then the computer might have been upgraded.

External links

• Top500.org
• Netlib
• An Overview of High Performance Computing and Challenges for the Future - Jack Dongarra
  Jack Dongarra
  Jack J. Dongarra is a University Distinguished Professor of Computer Sciencein the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee...
  
  disusses the TOP500 benchmark, its history and its trends.
• Green500 - Top500 supercomputers ranked by energy efficiency.