TOP500

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 is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. 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.
Currently the latest TOP500 list is the 56th published in November 2020. Since June 2020, the Japanese Fugaku is the world's most powerful supercomputer, reaching initially 415.53 petaFLOPS and 442.01 petaFlops after an update in November 2020 on the LINPACK benchmarks. China currently dominates the list with 212 supercomputers, leading the second place (United States) by a record margin of 113. Ranked by performance the most powerful supercomputers are located in the US (669 petaFLOPS). Followed by Japan (594 petaFLOPS) and China (564 petaFLOPS).
The TOP500 list is compiled by Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and, until his death in 2014, Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany.
The TOP500 project lists also Green500 and HPCG benchmark list.
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 arose at the University of Mannheim to use a detailed listing of installed systems as the basis. In early 1993, Jack Dongarra was persuaded to join the project with his LINPACK benchmarks. A first test version was produced in May 1993, partly based on data available on the Internet, including the following sources:
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 ranked position has grown steadily in accordance with Moore's law, doubling roughly every 14 months. , "Summit" was fastest with an Rpeak of 187.6593 PFLOPS. For comparison, this is over 1,432,513 times faster than the Connection Machine CM-5/1024 (1,024 cores), which was the fastest system in November 1993 (twenty-five years prior) with an Rpeak of 131.0 GFLOPS.
Architecture and operating systems.
, all supercomputers on TOP500 are 64-bit, mostly based on CPUs using the x86-64 instruction set architecture (of which 459 are Intel EMT64-based and 22 are AMD AMD64-based. The few exceptions are all based on RISC architectures). Thirteen supercomputers, including the no 2. and no. 3 are based on the Power ISA used by IBM POWER microprocessors, three on Fujitsu-designed SPARC64 chips. One computer uses another non-US design, the Japanese PEZY-SC (based on the British ARM) as an accelerator paired with Intel's Xeon.
In recent years heterogeneous computing, mostly using Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPU) or Intel's x86-based Xeon Phi as coprocessors, has dominated the TOP500 because of better performance per watt ratios and often providing higher absolute performance. The only major recent exceptions are the aforementioned Fugaku, Sunway TaihuLight and K computer. Tianhe-2 is also an interesting exception, as while it does use accelerators (just not GPUs), i.e. Xeon Phi, US sanctions blocked the upgrade, but still the upgraded Tianhe-2A is faster with non-US-based Matrix-2000, accelerators which where exploited ahead of schedule. Frontera supercomputer, ranked 5th at debut, based on 28-core (56-thread) Intel Xeon Platinum is also an exception, as it was measured without help of GPUs which were later added, but it has two subsystems, both with Nvidia GPUs, and one of them additionally with POWER9 CPUs, and the other liquid immersion cooling.
Two computers which first appeared on the list in 2018 are based on architectures never before seen on the Top500. One was a new x86-64 microarchitecture from Chinese manufacturer Sugon, using Hygon Dhyana CPUs (these result from a collaboration with AMD, and are a minor variant of Zen-based AMD EPYC) and is ranked 38th, and the other was the first ever ARM-based computer on the list (then upgraded for June 2019) using Cavium ThunderX2 CPUs. Before the ascendancy of 32-bit x86 and later 64-bit x86-64 in the early 2000s, a variety of RISC processor families made up most TOP500 supercomputers, including RISC architectures such as SPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC, and Alpha.
All the fastest supercomputers in the decade since the Earth Simulator supercomputer have used operating systems based on Linux. , all the listed supercomputers use an operating system based on the Linux kernel.
Since November 2015, no computer on the list runs Windows. In November 2014, Windows Azure cloud computer was 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 on the list, until it also dropped off the list. It was ranked 436 in its last appearance on the list released in June 2015, while its best rank was 11 in 2008. There are no longer any Mac OS computers on the list. It had at most five such systems at a time, one more than the Windows systems that came later, while the total performance share for Windows was higher. The relative performance share of the whole list was however similar, and never high for either.
It has been well over a decade since MIPS systems dropped entirely off the list while the "Gyoukou" supercomputer that jumped to 4th place in November 2017 (after a huge upgrade) has MIPS as a small part of the coprocessors. Use of 2,048-core coprocessors (plus 8× 6-core MIPS, for each, that "no longer require to rely on an external Intel Xeon E5 host processor") make the supercomputer much more energy efficient than the other top 10 (i.e. it is 5th on Green500 and other such "ZettaScaler-2.2"-based systems take first three spots). At 19.86 million cores, it is by far the biggest system: almost double that of the best manycore system in the TOP500, the Chinese Sunway TaihuLight, ranked 3rd.
TOP 500.
After an upgrade, as of 56th TOP500 in November 2020,
From the 52nd list (November 2018) to the 53rd list (June 2019), the Xeon Platinum-based Frontera is the only new top-10 supercomputer, then 5th fastest and the upgraded POWER9-based Lassen moved from 11th to 10th. Sequoia became the last Blue Gene/Q model to drop completely off the list; it had been ranked 10th on the 52nd list (and 1st on the June 2012, 41st list, after an upgrade).
Since November 2020, the last computer on the list delivers a Rmax performance of 1.3 petaflops.
Legend:
Other rankings.
Top countries.
Numbers below represent the number of computers in the TOP500 that are in each of the listed countries or territories.
Additional Statistics.
By number of systems :
Note: All operating systems of the TOP500 systems are Linux-family based , but Linux above is "generic" Linux.
The oldest system is currently the Endeavour at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at NASA Ames Research Center. It initially appeared on the 35th list in June 2010 with a Rmax of 50.3 teraFLOPS ranked as no. 112. After several updates this system is ranked as no. 328 with a Rmax of 1.654 teraFLOPS.
Sunway TaihuLight is the system with the most CPU-Cores (10,649,600). Tianhe-2 has the most GPU/accelerator cores (4,554,752). Fugaku is the system with the greatest power consumption with 29,900 megawatts.
New developments in supercomputing.
In November 2014, it was announced that the United States was developing two new supercomputers to exceed China's Tianhe-2 in its place 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. On 10 April 2015, US government agencies banned selling chips, from Nvidia to supercomputing centers in China as "acting contrary to the national security ... interests of the United States"; and Intel Corporation from providing Xeon chips to China due to their use, according to the US, in researching nuclear weaponsresearch to which US export control law bans US companies from contributing"The Department of Commerce refused, saying it was concerned about nuclear research being done with the machine."
On 29 July 2015, President Obama signed an executive order creating a National Strategic Computing Initiative calling for the accelerated development of an exascale (1000 petaflop) system and funding research into post-semiconductor computing.
In June 2016, Japanese firm Fujitsu announced at the International Supercomputing Conference that its future exascale supercomputer will feature processors of its own design that implement the ARMv8 architecture. The Flagship2020 program, by Fujitsu for RIKEN plans to break the exaflops barrier by 2020 through the Fugaku supercomputer, (and "it looks like China and France have a chance to do so and that the United States is contentfor the moment at leastto wait until 2023 to break through the exaflops barrier.") These processors will also implement extensions to the ARMv8 architecture equivalent to HPC-ACE2 that Fujitsu is developing with ARM Holdings.
In June 2016, Sunway TaihuLight became the No. 1 system with 93 petaflop/s (PFLOP/s) on the Linpack benchmark.
In November 2016, Piz Daint was upgraded, moving it from 8th to 3rd, leaving the US with no systems under the TOP3 for only the 2nd time ever.
Inspur has been one of the largest HPC system manufacturer based out of Jinan, China. , Inspur has become the third manufacturer to have manufactured 64-way systema record which has been previously mastered by IBM and HP. The company has registered over $10B in revenues and have successfully provided a number of HPC systems to countries outside China such as Sudan, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela. Inspur was also a major technology partner behind both the supercomputers from China, namely Tianhe-2 and Taihu which lead the top 2 positions of Top500 supercomputer list up to November 2017. Inspur and Supermicro released a few platforms aimed at HPC using GPU such as SR-AI and AGX-2 in May 2017.
In November 2017, for the second time in a row there were no system from the USA under the TOP3. #1 and #2 were installed in China, a system in Switzerland at #3, and a new system in Japan was #4 pushing the top US system to #5.
In June 2018, Summit, an IBM-built system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, USA, took the #1 spot with a performance of 122.3 petaflop/s (PFLOP/s), and Sierra, a very similar system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, CA, USA took #3. These two system took also the first two spots on the HPCG benchmark. Due to Summit and Sierra, the USA took back the lead as consumer of HPC performance with 38.2% of the overall installed performance while China was second with 29.1% of the overall installed performance. For the first time ever, the leading HPC manufacturer is not a US company. Lenovo took the lead with 23.8% of systems installed. It is followed by HPE with 15.8%, Inspur with 13.6%, Cray with 11.2%, and Sugon with 11%.
On 18 March 2019, the United States Department of Energy and Intel announced the first exaFLOP supercomputer would be operational at Argonne National Laboratory by the end of 2021. The computer, named Aurora, is to be delivered to Argonne by Intel and Cray.
On 7 May 2019, The U.S. Department of Energy announced a contract with Cray to build the "Frontier" supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Frontier is anticipated to be operational in 2021 and, with a performance of greater than 1.5 exaflops, should then be the world's most powerful computer.
As of June 2019, all TOP500 systems deliver a petaflop or more on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, with the entry level to the list now at 1.022 petaflops.
Large machines not on the list.
Some major systems are not on the list. The largest example is the NCSA's Blue Waters which publicly announced the decision not to participate in the list because they do not feel it accurately indicates the ability of any system to do useful work. Other organizations decide not to list systems for security and/or commercial competitiveness reasons. Additional purpose-built machines that are not capable or do not run the benchmark were not included, such as RIKEN MDGRAPE-3 and MDGRAPE-4.
Computers and architectures that have dropped off the list.
IBM Roadrunner is no longer on the list (nor is any other using the Cell coprocessor, or PowerXCell).
Although Itanium-based systems reached second rank in 2004, none now remain.
Similarly (non-SIMD-style) vector processors (NEC-based such as the Earth simulator that was fastest in 2002) have also fallen off the list. Also the Sun Starfire computers that occupied many spots in the past now no longer appear.
The last non-Linux computers on the list the two AIX ones running on POWER7 (in July 2017 ranked 494th and 495th originally 86th and 85th), dropped off the list in November 2017.