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. In the most recent list (November 2016), the Chinese Sunway TaihuLight is the world's most powerful supercomputer, reaching 93.015 petaFLOPS on the LINPACK benchmarks.
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 from 1993 until his death in 2014, Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany.
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:
- "List of the World's Most Powerful Computing Sites" maintained by Gunter Ahrendt
- David Kahaner, the director of the Asian Technology Information Program (ATIP); published a report in 1992, titled "Kahaner Report on Supercomputer in Japan" 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 #1 ranked position has grown steadily in accord with Moore's law, doubling roughly every 14 months. As of November 2014, Tianhe-2 was fastest with an Rpeak of 54.9024Â PFLOPS, is over 419,102 times faster than the fastest system in November 1993, the Connection Machine CM-5/1024 (1024 cores) with Rpeak of 131.0Â GFLOPS.
Architecture and operating systems
In June 2016, a Chinese computer made the top based on SW26010 processors, a new, radically modified, model in the Sunway (or ShenWei) line.
As of November 2016, TOP500 supercomputers are now all 64-bit, mostly based on x86-64 CPUs (Intel EMT64 and AMD AMD64 instruction set architecture), with few exceptions (all based on reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architectures) including 22 supercomputers based on Power Architecture used by IBM POWER microprocessors, seven SPARC (all with Fujitsu-designed SPARC-chips, one of which surprisingly made the top in 2011 without a GPU, currently ranked seventh), and two, seemingly related, Chinese designs: the ShenWei-based (ranked 11 in 2011, ranked 158th in November 2016) and Sunway SW26010-based ranked 1 in 2016, making up the remainder (another non-US design is PEZY-SC, while it's an accelerator paired with Intel's Xeon). Before the ascendance 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.
In recent years heterogeneous computing, mostly using Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPU) as coprocessors, has become a popular way to reach a better performance per watt ratio and higher absolute performance; it is almost required for good performance and to make the top (or top 10), with some exceptions, such as the mentioned SPARC computer without any coprocessors. An x86-based coprocessor, Xeon Phi, has also been used.
All the fastest supercomputers in the decade since the Earth Simulator supercomputer have used operating systems based on Linux. As of November 2016, 498 or 99.6% of the world's fastest supercomputers use the Linux kernel. The remaining two or 0.4%, run AIX, a variant of Unix. Within those 99.6% running Linux, are the most powerful supercomputers including all those ranking as the top ten (and virtually all the fastest computers).
The non-Linux computers on the list â€" the two AIX ones â€" run on POWER7 (ranked 386th and 387th). Those are made by IBM. IBM has higher ranked computers running Linux, including places 4 and 9.
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 had been ranked 436 in its last appearance on the list released in June 2015; its best rank was 11 in 2008.
Top 10 ranking
Legend:
- Rank â€" 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 â€" 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 â€" This is the theoretical peak performance of the system. Measured in PFLOPS.
- Name â€" Some supercomputers are unique, at least on its location, and are thus named by their owner.
- Model â€" The computing platform as it is marketed.
- Processor cores â€" The number of active processor cores actively used running LINPACK. After this figure is the instruction set architecture or processor microarchitecture of the cores named. If the interconnect between computing nodes is of interest, it's also included here.
- Vendor â€" The manufacturer of the platform and hardware.
- Site â€" The name of the facility operating the supercomputer.
- Country â€" The country in which the computer is located.
- Year â€" The year of installation or last major update.
- Operating system â€" The operating system that the computer uses.
Other rankings
Top countries
Numbers below represent the number of computers in the TOP500 that are in each of the listed countries.
Systems ranked #1 since 1976
- NRCPC Sunway TaihuLight (National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi  China, June 2016 â€" present)
- NUDT Tianhe-2A (National Supercomputing Center of Guangzhou  China, June 2013 â€" June 2016)
- Cray Titan (Oak Ridge National Laboratory  United States, November 2012 â€" June 2013)
- IBM Sequoia Blue Gene/Q (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory  United States, June 2012 â€" November 2012)
- Fujitsu K computer (Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science  Japan, June 2011 â€" June 2012)
- NUDT Tianhe-IA (National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin  China, November 2010 â€" June 2011)
- Cray Jaguar (Oak Ridge National Laboratory  United States, November 2009 â€" November 2010)
- IBM Roadrunner (Los Alamos National Laboratory  United States, June 2008 â€" November 2009)
- IBM Blue Gene/L (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory  United States, November 2004 â€" June 2008)
- NEC Earth Simulator (Earth Simulator Center  Japan, June 2002 â€" November 2004)
- IBM ASCI White (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory  United States, November 2000 â€" June 2002)
- Intel ASCI Red (Sandia National Laboratories  United States, June 1997 â€" November 2000)
- Hitachi CP-PACS (University of Tsukuba  Japan, November 1996 â€" June 1997)
- Hitachi SR2201 (University of Tokyo  Japan, June 1996 â€" November 1996)
- Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel (National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan  Japan, November 1994 â€" June 1996)
- Intel Paragon XP/S140 (Sandia National Laboratories  United States, June 1994 â€" November 1994)
- Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel (National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan  Japan, November 1993 â€" June 1994)
- TMC CM-5 (Los Alamos National Laboratory  United States, June 1993 â€" November 1993)
- NEC SX-3/44 ( Japan, 1992â€"1993)
- Fujitsu VP2600/10 ( Japan, 1990â€"1991)
- Cray Y-MP/832 ( United States, 1988â€"1989)
- Cray-2 ( United States, 1985â€"1987)
- Cray X-MP ( United States, 1983â€"1985)
- Cray-1 ( United States, 1976â€"1982)
Number of systems
By number of systems as of June 2016:
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 150â€"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 weapons â€" research to which US export control law bans US companies from contributing â€" "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 (and "it looks like China and France have a chance to do so and that the United States is content â€" for the moment at least â€" to 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.
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 Arab, Venezuela. Inspur was also a major technology partner behind both the supercomputers from China, namely Tianhe-2 and Taihu which leads the top 2 positions of Top500 supercomputer list of December 2016. Inspur and Supermicro released a few platforms aimed at HPC using GPU such as SR-AI and AGX-2 in May 2017.
Large machines not on the list
Some major systems are not listed 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 for any system to be able 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 drop off the list
IBM Roadrunner is no longer on the list (or any other using the Cell coprocessor, or PowerXCell as in the Roadrunner supercomputer), but it is an example of a computer that would easily be included, if it had not been decommissioned, as it is faster than the one ranked 500th.
Conversely, computers, such as the Microsoft Azure, have dropped off the list only because the stated performance numbers are no longer high enough, while in principle, the computers could have been upgraded to get faster (or not) without being reported.
All Itanium based systems (including the one which reached second rank in 2004) and (non-SIMD-style) vector processors (NEC-based such as the Earth simulator that was fastest in 2002) have also fallen off the list. Similarly the Sun Starfire computers that occupied many spots have been overtaken.
See also
- LINPACK benchmarks
- Computer science
- Computing
- Graph500
- Green500
- HPC Challenge Benchmark
- Instructions per second
References
External links
- Official website
- LINPACK benchmarks at TOP500