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,[1] a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.

China currently dominates the list with 229 supercomputers, leading the second place (United States) by a record margin of 121. Since June 2018, the American Summit is the world's most powerful supercomputer, reaching 143.5 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.

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]

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 June2018[update], Summit was fastest with an Rpeak[6] of 187.6593PFLOPS. 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 131.0GFLOPS.[7]

As of November2018[update], all supercomputers on TOP500 are 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). Thirteen supercomputers are based on the Power Architecture used by IBM POWER microprocessors and six on Fujitsu-designed SPARC64 chips (one of which the K computer was 1st in 2011 without any GPUs (and is still 3rd on the HPCG list[8]). A further two computers are based on seemingly related Chinese designs: ShenWei and Sunway SW26010 also using Chinese co-processors; the latter ascended to 1st in 2016 (it has since been superseded by an IBM POWER-based system). Further, a few computers use another non-US design, the PEZY-SC (based on ARM[9]) as an accelerator paired with Intel's Xeon.

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 (a collaboration between AMD and the Chinese, based on Zen) and is ranked 38th,[10] and the other was the first ever ARM-based computer on the list using Cavium ThunderX2 CPUs.[11] 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.

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; the only recent exception being the aforementioned K computer.

All the fastest supercomputers in the decade since the Earth Simulator supercomputer have used operating systems based on Linux. Since November2017[update], all the listed supercomputers use an operating system based on the Linux kernel.[12][13]

Since November 2015, no computer on the list runs Windows. In November 2014, Windows Azure[14] 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.[15]

It has been well over a decade since MIPS systems dropped entirely off the list[16] 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"[17]) 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).[18] 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.

Legend:

Numbers below represent the number of computers in the TOP500 that are in each of the listed countries.

By number of systems as of November2018[update][31]:

Note: All operating systems of the TOP500 systems use Linux, but Linux above is generic Linux.

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 150300 peak petaflops.[32] 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";[33] 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."[34]

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.[35]

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 for the moment at least to wait until 2023 to break through the exaflops barrier."[36]) These processors will also implement extensions to the ARMv8 architecture equivalent to HPC-ACE2 that Fujitsu is developing with ARM Holdings.[36]

Inspur has been one of the largest HPC system manufacturer based out of Jinan, China. As of May2017[update], 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.[37]

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[38] because they do not feel it accurately indicates the ability for any system to be able to do useful work.[39] 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.

IBM Roadrunner[40] 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,[41][42] none now remain.

Similarly (non-SIMD-style) vector processors (NEC-based such as the Earth simulator that was fastest in 2002[43]) 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[44] originally 86th and 85th), dropped off the list in November 2017.

See the article here:

TOP500 - Wikipedia