The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful publicly-known computer 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 benchmark for distributed-memory computers. Image File history File links Top500_logo. ... A BlueGene supercomputer cabinet. ... A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems. ... LINPACK is a software library for performing numerical linear algebra on digital computers. ... In computing, a benchmark is the result of running a computer program, a set of programs, or other operations, in order to assess the relative performance of an object, by running a number of standard tests and trials against it. ...

The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany, Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 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[1]. In 1986, he became co-founder and organizer of the first Mannheim Supercomputer Conference[2], which has been held annually ever since. ... The University of Mannheim is one of the younger German universities. ... Jack Dongarra is a University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department [1] at the University of Tennessee. ... The University of Tennessee (UT), sometimes called the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UT Knoxville or UTK), is the flagship institution of the statewide land-grant University of Tennessee public university system. ... A row of Seaborg computers at NERSC. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, or NERSC for short, is a designated user facility operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Department of Energy. ... The Berkeley Lab is perched on a hill overlooking the Berkeley central campus and San Francisco Bay. ...

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.

The data on TOP500 was originally copied from the "List of the world's most powerful computing sites", which had been started six months earlier in January 1993 as a not for profit service. TOP500 never was as accurate, up-to-date, unbiased or detailed as the "List", but due to significant corporate sponsorship it became used in various marketing materials. After ten years the "List" closed down due to the disheartening lack of recognition.[1]

The world's fastest supercomputer is now able to process information at 1Pflops which is almost 3 times faster then the #1 ranked item on the list directly below. Also there are other faster computers then below, Made very recently and they are known as the Xeon processors.

Current List (November 2006)

The following table gives the Top 10 positions of the 28th TOP500 List released during the Supercomputing Conference (SC06), November 11-17, 2006 in Tampa, Florida.http://sc06.supercomputing.org/ Tampas skyline For alternate meanings, see Tampa (disambiguation) Tampa is a city located in Hillsborough County on the west coast of Florida. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

For alternate meanings, see Cray (disambiguation). ...

Highlights from the Top 10

Taken from the official TOP500 site:

• Unchallenged leader remains the DOE's IBM BlueGene/L system, installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
• The new No. 2 systems is Sandia National Laboratories’ Cray Red Storm supercomputer, only the second system ever to be recorded to exceed the 100 Tflops mark with 101.4 Tflops.
• The new No. 5 is the largest system in Europe, an IBM JS21 cluster installed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center
• The Earth Simulator, built by NEC, which held the No. 1 spot for five lists, has now slipped out of the TOP10 and is ranked at No 14.

ESC cabinets The Earth Simulator (ES) was the fastest supercomputer in the world from 2002 to 2004, located at the Earth Simulator Center (ESC) in Kanazawa-ku (ward), Yokohama-shi, Japan. ...

General highlights from the Top 500 since the last edition

Taken from the official TOP500 site:

• The entry level to the list moved up to the 2.7369 Tflops mark on the Linpack benchmark, compared to 2.026 Tflops six months ago.
• The entry point for the top 100 increased in six months from 4.71 Tflops to 6.62 Tflops.
• The last system on the newest list was listed at position 362 in the last TOP500 just six months ago. This is a medium turnover rate for the TOP500. Please verify the medium turnover rate claim
• Total accumulated performance has grown to 3.53 Pflops, compared to 2.79 Pflops six months ago and 2.30 Pflops one year ago.

Trends

A paper^[1] made available in early 2007 presents the results of some statistical analyses of the Top 500 from 1993 to 2006. Some of the conclusions are:

• Each list exhibits a Zipf distribution
• Speeds increase by about 90% per year.
• The relative power of the bottom of the list as compared to the top of the list has increased each year.

Originally the term Zipfs law meant the observation of Harvard linguist George Kingsley Zipf (SAMPA: [zIf]) that the frequency of use of the nth-most-frequently-used word in any natural language is approximately inversely proportional to n. ...

References

1. ^ A note on the Zipf distribution of Top500 supercomputers, Matei Ripeanu, in IEEE Distributed Systems Online

External links

• http://www.top500.org/
• http://www.netlib.org/benchmark/hpl/