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Total computational power of the 500 most powerful computer systems in the world, 1993–2010. Note the logarithmic scale.

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 (non-distributed) most powerful known 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, 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, 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.

Project history[link]

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:^[1][2]

• "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.

Since 1993, performance of the #1 ranked position has steadily grown in agreement with Moore's law, doubling roughly every 14 months. The fastest system as of November 2011 is over 176,000 times faster (in terms of peak Tflops) than the fastest system as of June 1993.^[3]

The systems ranked #1 since 1993[link]

• Fujitsu K computer ( Japan, June 2011 – present)
• 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)

Rankings[link]

November 2011[link]

The following table gives the Top 10 positions of the 38th TOP500 List released on November 14, 2011.

Rank	Rmax Rpeak (Pflops)	Name	Computer Processor cores	Vendor	Site Country, year	Operating system
1	10.510 11.2804	K computer	RIKEN 88,128×8 SPARC64 VIIIfx processors	Fujitsu	RIKEN   Japan, 2011	Linux
2	2.566 4.701	Tianhe-1A	NUDT YH Cluster 14,336×6 Xeon + 7168×14 NVIDIA Tesla, Arch (Proprietary)[4]	NUDT	National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin   China, 2010	Linux
3	1.759 2.331	Jaguar	Cray XT5 224,162 Opteron	Cray	Oak Ridge National Laboratory   United States, 2009	Linux (CLE)
4	1.271 2.9843	Nebulae	Dawning TC3600 Blade 55,680 Xeon + 64,960 Tesla, InfiniBand	Dawning	National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen (NSCS)   China, 2010	Linux
5	1.192 2.28763	TSUBAME 2.0	HP Cluster Platform 3000SL 73,278 Xeon, Tesla	NEC/HP	GSIC Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology   Japan, 2010	Linux (SLES 11)
6	1.11 1.36581	Cielo	Cray XE6 142,272 Opteron	Cray	Los Alamos National Laboratory   United States, 2010	Linux (CLE)
7	1.088 1.31533	Pleiades	Altix 111,104 Xeon, InfiniBand	SGI	Ames Research Center   United States, 2011	Linux
8	1.054 1.28863	Hopper	Cray XE6 153,408 Opteron	Cray	Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory   United States, 2010	Linux (CLE)
9	1.05 1.25455	Tera 100	Bull Bullx 138,368 Xeon, InfiniBand	Bull SA	Commissariat à l'énergie atomique (CEA)   France, 2010	Linux (XBAS)
10	1.042 1.37578	Roadrunner	BladeCenter QS22/LS21 122,400 Cell/Opteron	IBM	Los Alamos National Laboratory   United States, 2009	Linux (Fedora 9)

Legend[link]

• 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.

See also[link]

	Computer Science portal
	Information technology portal

• LINPACK benchmarks
• Computer science
• Computing
• HPC Challenge Benchmark
• Performance per watt
• Green500

References[link]

External links[link]

• Top500.org
• Netlib
• An Overview of High Performance Computing and Challenges for the Future – Jack Dongarra discusses the TOP500 benchmark, its history and its trends.
• Green500 – Top500 supercomputers ranked by energy efficiency.