The 60th TOP500 was published in November 2022. Since June 2022, the United States' Frontier is the most powerful supercomputer on TOP500, reaching 1102 petaFlops (1.102 exaFlops) on the LINPACK benchmarks.[2] The United States has by far the highest share of total computing power on the list (nearly 50%),[3] while China currently leads the list in number of systems with 173 supercomputers, with the U.S. not far behind in second place.
The TOP500 project also includes lists such as Green500 (measuring energy efficiency) and HPCG (measuring I/O bandwidth).[citation needed]
History
Rapid growth of supercomputer performance, based on data from the top500.org website. 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:[4][5]
"List of the World's Most Powerful Computing Sites" maintained by Gunter Ahrendt[6]
David Kahaner, the director of the Asian Technology Information Program (ATIP);[7] published a report in 1992, titled "Kahaner Report on Supercomputer in Japan"[5] which had an immense amount of data.[citation needed]
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. In June 2018, Summit was fastest with an Rpeak[8] 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.[9]
Architecture and operating systems
Share of processor families in TOP500 supercomputers by year[needs update]
Two computers which first appeared on the list in 2018 were based on architectures new to the TOP500. One was a new x86-64 microarchitecture from Chinese manufacturer Sugon, using Hygon Dhyana CPUs (these resulted from a collaboration with AMD, and are a minor variant of Zen-based AMD EPYC) and was ranked 38th, now 117th,[11] and the other was the first ARM-based computer on the list – using Cavium ThunderX2 CPUs.[12] Before the ascendancy of 32-bitx86 and later 64-bitx86-64 in the early 2000s, a variety of RISC processor families made up most TOP500 supercomputers, including SPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC, and Alpha.
Share of operating systems families in TOP500 supercomputers by time trend
All the fastest supercomputers since the Earth Simulator supercomputer have used operating systems based on Linux. Since November 2017[update], all the listed supercomputers use an operating system based on the Linux kernel.[13][14]
Since November 2015, no computer on the list runs Windows (while Microsoft reappeared on the list in 2021 with Ubuntu based on Linux). In November 2014, Windows Azure[15] cloud computer was no longer on the list of fastest supercomputers (its best rank was 165th 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 436th in its last appearance on the list released in June 2015, while its best rank was 11th in 2008.[16] 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. Their relative performance share of the whole list was however similar, and never high for either. In 2004 System X supercomputer based on Mac OS X (Xserve, with 2,200 PowerPC 970 processors) once ranked 7th place.[17]
It has been well over a decade since MIPS systems dropped entirely off the list[18] though the Gyoukou supercomputer that jumped to 4th place[19] in November 2017 had a MIPS-based design 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]) made the supercomputer much more energy efficient than the other top 10 (i.e. it was 5th on Green500 and other such ZettaScaler-2.2-based systems take first three spots).[21] At 19.86 million cores, it was by far the largest system by core-count, with almost double that of the then-best manycore system, the Chinese Sunway TaihuLight.
TOP 500
As of February 2024[update], the number one supercomputer, Frontier, an AMD-based system, is also the number two system on Green500.[22] The leader on Green500 is the even smaller new Henri, Nvidia-based supercomputer. In June 2022, the top 4 systems of Graph500 both used AMD CPUs and AMD accelerators.
After an upgrade, for the 56th TOP500 in November 2020,
Fugaku grew its HPL performance to 442 petaflops, a modest increase from the 416 petaflops the system achieved when it debuted in June 2020. More significantly, the ARMv8.2 based Fugaku increased its performance on the new mixed precision HPC-AI benchmark to 2.0 exaflops, besting its 1.4 exaflops mark recorded six months ago. These represent the first benchmark measurements above one exaflop for any precision on any type of hardware.[23]
Summit, a previously fastest supercomputer, is currently highest-ranked IBM-made supercomputer; with IBM POWER9 CPUs. Sequoia became the last IBM Blue Gene/Q model to drop completely off the list; it had been ranked 10th on the 52nd list (and 1st on the June 2012, 41st list, after an upgrade).
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.[24]
Microsoft is back on the TOP500 list with six Microsoft Azure instances (that use/are benchmarked with Ubuntu, so all the supercomputers are still Linux-based), with CPUs and GPUs from same vendors, the fastest one currently 11th,[25] and another older/slower previously made 10th.[26] And Amazon with one AWS instance currently ranked 64th (it was previously ranked 40th). The number of Arm-based supercomputers is 6, currently all Arm-based supercomputers use the same Fujitsu CPU as in the number 2 system, with the next one previously ranked 13th, now 25th.[27]
Top 10 positions of the 62nd TOP500 in November 2023[28]
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.
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.
Manufacturer – 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.
Other rankings
Top countries
Numbers below represent the number of computers in the TOP500 that are in each of the listed countries or territories. As of 2023, United States has the most supercomputers on the list, with 161 machines. The United States has the highest aggregate computational power at 3,639 Petaflops Rmax with Japan second (654 Pflop/s) and China third (398 Pflop/s).
Distribution of supercomputers in the TOP500 list by country (as of November 2023[update])[31]
Note: All operating systems of the TOP500 systems are Linux-family based, but Linux above is generic Linux.
Sunway TaihuLight is the system with the most CPU cores (10,649,600). Tianhe-2 has the most GPU/accelerator cores (4,554,752). Fugaku is the system with the greatest power consumption with 29,900 kilowatts.
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 150–300 peak petaflops.[76] 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";[77] 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."[78]
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."[80]) These processors will also implement extensions to the ARMv8 architecture equivalent to HPC-ACE2 that Fujitsu is developing with Arm.[80]
In June 2016, Sunway TaihuLight became the No. 1 system with 93 petaflop/s (PFLOP/s) on the Linpack benchmark.[81]
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.[82][83]
Inspur has been one of the largest HPC system manufacturer based out of Jinan, China. As of May 2017[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.[84]
In November 2017, for the second time in a row there were no system from the US under the TOP3. No. 1 and No. 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.[85]
In June 2018, Summit, an IBM-built system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, US, took the No. 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, US took #3. These two system took also the first two spots on the HPCG benchmark. Due to Summit and Sierra, the US 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% of systems installed. It is followed by HPE with 15.8%, Inspur with 13.6%, Cray with 11.2%, and Sugon with 11%.
[86]
On 7 May 2019, The U.S. Department of Energy announced a contract with Cray 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.[89]
Since 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.[90]
In May 2022, the Frontier supercomputer broke the exascale barrier, completing more than a quintillion 64-bit floating point arithmetic calculations per second. Frontier clocked in at approximately 1.1 exaflops, beating out the previous record-holder, Fugaku.[91][92]
Large machines not on the list
Some major systems are not on the list. A prominent example is the NCSA's Blue Waters which publicly announced the decision not to participate in the list[93] because they do not feel it accurately indicates the ability of any system to do useful work.[94] Other organizations decide not to list systems for security and/or commercial competitiveness reasons. One such example is the National Supercomputing Center at Qingdao's OceanLight supercomputer, completed in March 2021, which was submitted for, and won, the Gordon Bell Prize. The computer is an exaflop computer, but was not submitted to the TOP500 list; the first exaflop machine submitted to the TOP500 list was Frontier. Analysts suspected that the reason the NSCQ did not submit what would otherwise have been the world's first exascale supercomputer was to avoid inflaming political sentiments and fears within the United States, in the context of the United States – China trade war.[95] 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. A Google Tensor Processing Unit v4 pod is capable of 1.1 exaflops of peak performance,[96] however these units are highly specialized to run machine learning workloads and the TOP500 measures a specific benchmark algorithm using a specific numeric precision.
Computers and architectures that have dropped off the list
Although Itanium-based systems reached second rank in 2004,[98][99] none now remain.
Similarly (non-SIMD-style) vector processors (NEC-based such as the Earth simulator that was fastest in 2002[100]) 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[101] originally 86th and 85th), dropped off the list in November 2017.
^"The 2,048-core PEZY-SC2 sets a Green500 record". WikiChip Fuse. 1 November 2017. Archived from the original on 16 November 2017. Retrieved 15 November 2017. Powering the ZettaScaler-2.2 is the PEZY-SC2. The SC2 is a second-generation chip featuring twice as many cores – i.e., 2,048 cores with 8-way SMT for a total of 16,384 threads. […] The first-generation SC incorporated two ARM926 cores and while that was sufficient for basic management and debugging its processing power was inadequate for much more. The SC2 uses a hexa-core P-Class P6600 MIPS processor which share the same memory address as the PEZY cores, improving performance and reducing data transfer overhead. With the powerful MIPS management cores, it is now also possible to entirely eliminate the Xeon host processor. However, PEZY has not done so yet.
^"June 2020". June 2020. Archived from the original on 1 September 2022. Retrieved 25 June 2020.
^Summit, an IBM-built supercomputer now running at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), captured the number one spot June 2018 with a performance of 122.3 petaflops on High Performance Linpack (HPL), the benchmark used to rank the TOP500 list. Summit has 4,356 nodes, each one equipped with two 22-core POWER9 CPUs, and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. The nodes are linked together with a Mellanox dual-rail EDR InfiniBand network."TOP500 List - June 2018". The TOP500 List of the 500 most powerful commercially available computer systems known. The TOP500 project. 30 June 2018. Archived from the original on 25 June 2018. Retrieved 10 July 2019.
^Advanced reports that Oak Ridge National Laboratory was fielding the world's fastest supercomputer were proven correct when the 40th edition of the twice-yearly TOP500 List of the world's top supercomputers was released today (Nov. 12, 2012). Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at Oak Ridge, achieved 17.59 Petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark. Titan has 560,640 processors, including 261,632 NVIDIA K20x accelerator cores."TOP500 List - November 2012". The TOP500 List of the 500 most powerful commercially available computer systems known. The TOP500 project. 12 November 2012. Archived from the original on 2 July 2018. Retrieved 10 July 2019.
^For the first time since November 2009, a United States supercomputer sits atop the TOP500 list of the world's top supercomputers. Named Sequoia, the IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved an impressive 16.32 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 1,572,864 cores."TOP500 List - June 2012". The TOP500 List of the 500 most powerful commercially available computer systems known. The TOP500 project. 30 June 2012. Archived from the original on 2 July 2018. Retrieved 10 July 2019.
^The DOE/IBM BlueGene/L beta-System was able to claim the No. 1 position on the new TOP500 list with its record Linpack benchmark performance of 70.72 Tflop/s ("teraflops" or trillions of calculations per second). This system, once completed, will be moved to the DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif."TOP500 List - November 2004". The TOP500 List of the 500 most powerful commercially available computer systems known. The TOP500 project. 30 November 2004. Archived from the original on 2 July 2019. Retrieved 10 July 2019.
^ASCI Red a Sandia National Laboratories machine with 7264 Intel cores nabbed the #1 position in June of 1997."TOP500 List -June 1997". The TOP500 List of the 500 most powerful commercially available computer systems known. The TOP500 project. 30 June 1997. Archived from the original on 2 July 2019. Retrieved 10 July 2019.
^Kramer, William, Top500 versus Sustained Performance – Or the Ten Problems with the TOP500 List – And What to Do About Them. 21st International Conference On Parallel Architectures And Compilation Techniques (PACT12), 19–23 September 2012, Minneapolis, MN, US
