TOP500

Rapid growth of supercomputer performance, based on data from top500.org site. The loga­rithmic y-axis shows performance in GFLOPS.

  Combined performance of 500 largest supercomputers

  Fastest supercomputer

  Supercomputer in 500th place

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:[2][3]

• "List of the World's Most Powerful Computing Sites" maintained by Gunter Ahrendt[4]
• David Kahaner, the director of the Asian Technology Information Program (ATIP);[5] published a report in 1992, titled "Kahaner Report on Supercomputer in Japan"[3] which 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 No. 1 ranked position has grown steadily in accordance with Moore's law, doubling roughly every 14 months. As of June 2018, Summit was fastest with an Rpeak[6] 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.[7]

Share of processor architecture families in TOP500 supercomputers by time trend

As of November 2019, all supercomputers on TOP500 are 64-bit, mostly based on CPUs using the x86-64 instruction set architecture (of which 474 are Intel EMT64-based and 6 are AMD AMD64-based). The few exceptions are all based on RISC architectures). Thirteen supercomputers, including the top two, are based on the Power ISA used by IBM POWER microprocessors, three on Fujitsu-designed SPARC64 chips, two on ARM architecture, and one on the Chinese Sunway SW26010 design. One computer uses another non-US design, the Japanese PEZY-SC (based on the British ARM[8]) 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 higher absolute performance; it is almost required to make the top 10 or the top spot; the only major recent exception being the aforementioned K computer and Sunway TaihuLight. Tianhe-2 is also an interesting exception, as while it did 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,[9] accelerators which where exploited ahead of schedule. Frontera supercomputer, ranked 5th, 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,[10] but it has two subsystems, both with Nvidia GPUs, and one of them additionally with POWER9 CPUs, and the other liquid immersion cooling.[11][12]

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 vendor 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,[13] and the other was the first ever ARM-based computer on the list (then upgraded for June 2019) – using Cavium ThunderX2 CPUs.[14] 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. Since November 2017, all the listed supercomputers use an operating system based on the Linux kernel.[15][16]

Since November 2015, no computer on the list runs Windows. In November 2014, Windows Azure[17] 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.[18] 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[19] but 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"[20]) 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).[21] 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.

From the 52nd list (November 2018) to the 53rd list (June 2019), the Xeon Platinum-based Frontera is the only new supercomputer in the top 10 (at number 5) and the upgraded POWER9-based Lassen moved from 11th to 10th.[22] Titan and Sequoia became the last Blue Gene/Q models to drop out of the top10; they had been ranked 9th and 10th in the 52nd list (and 1st and 2nd in the November 2012, 40th list) and are now 12th and 13th.

"For the first time, all 500 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." However, for a different benchmark "Summit and Sierra remain the only two systems to exceed a petaflop on the HPCG benchmark, delivering 2.9 petaflops and 1.8 petaflops, respectively. The average HPCG result on the current list is 213.3 teraflops, a marginal increase from 211.2 six months ago."[23]

Of the top 10 computers in the 54th Top500 list, four are in the top 10 of the November 2019 Green500 list (most energy-efficient supercomputers):

Summit is #5 in the Green500 and #1 in the Top500

AI Bridging Cloud (ABCI) is #6 in the Green500 and #8 in the Top500

PANGEA III is #9 in the Green500 and #11 in the Top500

Sierra is #10 in the Green500 and #2 in the Top500

Top 10 positions of the 54th TOP500 in November 2019[24]

Rank	Rmax Rpeak (PFLOPS)	Name	Model	Processor	Interconnect	Vendor	Site country, year	Operating system
1	148.600 200.795	Summit	IBM Power System AC922	POWER9, Tesla V100	InfiniBand EDR	IBM	Oak Ridge National Laboratory  United States, 2018	Linux (RHEL)
2	94.640 125.712	Sierra	IBM Power System S922LC	POWER9, Tesla V100	InfiniBand EDR	IBM	Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory  United States, 2018	Linux (RHEL)
3	93.015 125.436	Sunway TaihuLight	Sunway MPP	SW26010	Sunway[25]	NRCPC	National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi  China, 2016[25]	Linux (Raise)
4	61.445 100.679	Tianhe-2A	TH-IVB-FEP	Xeon E5–2692 v2, Matrix-2000[26]	TH Express-2	NUDT	National Supercomputing Center in Guangzhou  China, 2013	Linux (Kylin)
5	23.516 38.746	Frontera	Dell C6420	Xeon Platinum 8280 (subsystems with e.g. POWER9 CPUs and Nvidia GPUs were added after official benchmarking[10])	InfiniBand HDR	Dell EMC	Texas Advanced Computing Center  United States, 2019	Linux (CentOS)
6	21.230 27.154	Piz Daint	Cray XC50	Xeon E5-2690 v3, Tesla P100	Aries	Cray	Swiss National Supercomputing Centre   Switzerland, 2016	Linux (CLE)
7	20.159 41.461	Trinity	Cray XC40	Xeon E5–2698 v3, Xeon Phi 7250	Aries	Cray	Los Alamos National Laboratory  United States, 2015	Linux (CLE)
8	19.880 32.577	AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure[27]	PRIMERGY CX2550 M4	Xeon Gold 6148, Tesla V100	InfiniBand EDR	Fujitsu	National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology  Japan, 2018	Linux
9	19.477 26.874	SuperMUC-NG [28]	ThinkSystem SD530	Xeon Platinum 8174 (plus not benchmarked e.g. 32 cloud GPU nodes with Tesla V100[29])	Intel Omni-Path	Lenovo	Leibniz Supercomputing Centre  Germany, 2018	Linux (SLES)
10	18.200 23.047	Lassen	IBM Power System S922LC	POWER9, Tesla V100	InfiniBand EDR	IBM	Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory  United States, 2018	Linux (RHEL)

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 benchmarks 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. Computed in petaFLOPS.
• Name – Some supercomputers are unique, at least on its location, and are thus named by their owner.
• Model – The computing platform as it is marketed.
• Processor – The instruction set architecture or processor microarchitecture, alongside GPU and accelerators when available.
• Interconnect – The interconnect between computing nodes. InfiniBand is most used (38%) by performance share, while Gigabit Ethernet is most used (54%) by number of computers.
• 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 located.
• Year – The year of installation or last major update.
• Operating system – The operating system that the computer uses.

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.[45] 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";[46] and Intel Corporation from providing Xeon chips to China due to their use, according to the US, in researching nuclear weapons – research 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."[47]

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.[48]

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 content – for the moment at least – to wait until 2023 to break through the exaflops barrier."[49]) These processors will also implement extensions to the ARMv8 architecture equivalent to HPC-ACE2 that Fujitsu is developing with ARM Holdings. [49]

In June 2016, Sunway TaihuLight became the No. 1 system with 93 petaflop/s (PFLOP/s) on the Linpack benchmark.[50]

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.[51][52]

Inspur has been one of the largest HPC system manufacturer based out of Jinan, China. As of May 2017, Inspur has become the third manufacturer to have manufactured 64-way system – a 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.[53]

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.[54]

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 percent of systems installed. It is followed by HPE with 15.8 percent, Inspur with 13.6 percent, Cray with 11.2 percent, and Sugon with 11 percent. [55]

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.[56][57]

On 7 May 2019, The U.S. Department of Energy announced a contract with Cray Inc. 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.[58]

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.[59]

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[60] because they do not feel it accurately indicates the ability of any system to do useful work.[61] 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.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to TOP500.

• Computer science
• Computing
• Graph500
• Green500
• HPC Challenge Benchmark
• Instructions per second
• LINPACK benchmarks
• List of fastest computers

• Official website
• LINPACK benchmarks at TOP500