Top500

Information about Top500

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.

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.

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.

Project History

In the early nineties a new definition of supercomputer was needed to produce meaningful statistics. After experimenting with metrics based on processor count in 1992 the idea was born at the University of Mannheim to use a detailed listing of installed systems as the basis. Early 1993 Jack Dongarra was convinced to join the project with his Linpack benchmark. A first test version was produced in May 1993 partially based on data available on the internet, including the following sources[1][2]:

Mannheim Supercomputer Statistics 1986-1992
one was "List of the World's Most Powerful Computing Sites" http://www.hoise.com/primeur/PL/96/pl-top500/ES-PL-11-96-4.html maintained by Gunter Ahrendt
another was through David Kahaner, who 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.

The Systems Ranked #1 Since 1993

IBM Blue Gene/L (since 2004.11)
NEC Earth Simulator (2002.06 - 2004.11)
IBM ASCI White (2000.11 - 2002.06)
Intel ASCI Red (1997.06 - 2000.11)
Hitachi CP-PACS (1996.11 - 1997.06)
Hitachi SR2201 (1996.06 - 1996.11)
Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel (1994.11 - 1996.06)
Intel Paragon XP/S140 (1994.06 - 1994.11)
Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel (1993.11 - 1994.06)
TMC CM-5 (1993.06 - 1993.11)

Current List (June 2007)

The following table gives the Top 10 positions of the 29th TOP500 List released during the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC07), June 26-29, 2007 in Dresden, Germany. [3]

Rank	Site Country Year installed	Name Computer Processors	Maker	Rmax Rpeak ^(Tflops)
1	Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory United States 2005	BlueGene/L eServer Blue Gene Solution 131072 (Power)	IBM	280.6 367
2	Oak Ridge National Laboratory United States 2006	Jaguar Cray XT4/XT3 23016 (Opteron)	Cray	101.7 119.35
3	Sandia National Laboratories United States 2006	Red Storm Cray XT3 26544 (Opteron)	Cray	101.4 127.411
4	IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center United States 2005	BGW eServer Blue Gene Solution 40960 (Power)	IBM	91.29 114.688
5	New York Center for Computional Sciences United States 2007	New York Blue eServer Blue Gene Solution 36864 (Power)	IBM	82.161 103.219
6	Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory United States 2005	ASC Purple eServer pSeries p5 575 12208 (Power)	IBM	75.76 92.781
7	RPI, Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations United States 2007	Unnamed eServer Blue Gene Solution 32768 (Power)	IBM	73.032 91.75
8	National Center for Supercomputing Applications United States 2007	Abe PowerEdge 1955 9600 (Xeon)	Dell	62.68 89.5872
9	Barcelona Supercomputing Center Spain 2006	MareNostrum BladeCenter JS21 10240 (Power)	IBM	62.63 94.208
10	Leibniz Rechenzentrum Germany 2007	HLRB-II SGI Altix 4700 9728 (Itanium 2)	SGI	56.52 62.2592

Highlights from the Top 10

Taken from the official TOP500 site:

While the No. 1 system is still unchallenged, the rest of the TOP10 experienced large changes since November 2006.
The new and previous No. 1 is DOE's IBM BlueGene/L system, installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) with a Linpack performance of 280.6 TFlop/s.
The upgraded Cray XT4/XT3 system at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is the third system ever recorded to exceed the 100 TFlop/s mark. It is No2 with 101.7 Tflop/s.
It ever so slightly edged out Sandia’s Cray Red Storm system, which holds the No. 3 spot with 101.4 TFlop/s.
Two new BlueGene/L systems entered the TOP10. They are both located in the state of New York and represent the largest academic supercomputer installations.
The No. 5 system is installed at Stony Brook, NY at the New York Center for Computational Science (NYCCS) http://www.sunysb.edu/nyccs/.
The No. 7 system at the Rensselaer Polytechnic at the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI), Troy, NY http://www.rpi.edu/research/ccni/.
The new No.8 system was built by Dell and is installed at NCSA in Illinois. It was measured at 62.68 TFlop/s.
Just behind on No. 9 is the largest system in Europe, an IBM JS21 cluster installed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, with performance of 62.63 TFlop/s. It held the No 5 spot just 6 month ago.
The No. 10 was captured by a new SGI system installed in Germany at the Leibniz Computing Center in Munich. It was measured with 56.52 TFlop/s
The first Japanese system is at No. 14. It is a cluster integrated by NEC based on Sun Fire X4600 with Opteron processors, ClearSpeed accelerators and an InfiniBand interconnect, installed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

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 4.005 TFlop/s mark on the Linpack benchmark, compared to 2.737 TFlop/s six months ago.
The last system on the list would have been listed at position 216 in the last TOP500 just six months ago. This is the largest turnover rate ever seen in the 15 years of the TOP500 project.
Total accumulated performance has grown to 4.92 PFlop/s, compared to 3.54 PFlop/s six months ago and 2.79 PFlop/s one year ago.
The entry point for the top 100 increased in six months from 6.65 TFlop/s to 9.29 TFlop/s.
A total of 289 systems (57.8 percent) are now using Intel processors. This is slightly up from six month ago (261 systems, 52.5 percent) and a represents a typical fraction recently seen for Intel chips in the TOP500.
The AMD Opteron family, which passed the IBM Power processors six month ago, remained the second most common processor family with 105 systems (21 percent) down from 113 systems (22.6 percent) six month ago. 85 systems (17 percent) use IBM Power processors down from 93 systems (18.6 percent) six month ago.
Dual core processors are the dominant chip architecture. The most impressive growth showed the number of systems using the Intel Woodcrest dual core chips which grew in six month from 31 to 205.
Another 90 systems use Opteron dual core processors up from 75 six month ago.
373 systems are labeled as clusters, making this the most common architecture in the TOP500 with a stable share of 74.6 percent.
InfiniBand technology is strongly increasing its share to 127 systems up from 78 six months ago. But Gigabit Ethernet is still the most used internal system interconnect technology (207 systems, down from 211 six month ago).
For quite some time, IBM and Hewlett-Packard have sold the bulk of systems at all performance levels of the TOP500.
IBM was ahead of HP since June 2004 but has lost the lead in the number of system this time with 38.4 percent (down from 47.2) compared to HP with 40.6 percent (up from 31.6).
IBM remains the clear leader in the TOP500 list in performance with 41.9 percent of installed performance (down from 49.5) compared to HP with 24.5 percent (up from 16.5).
In the system category again no other manufacturer could break the 5 percent barrier, but Dell got very close with 4.8 percent.
In the performance category the manufacturers with more than 5 percent are: Dell (9 percent of performance), Cray (7.3 percent of performance), and SGI (5.7 percent), each of which benefit from large systems in the TOP10.
IBM (82) and HP (181) sold together 263 out of 269 systems at commercial and industrial customers and have this important market segment clearly cornered.
The U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 281 of the 500 systems. The European share (127 systems up from 95) recovered and is again larger than the Asian share (72 down from 79 systems).
Dominant countries in Asia are Japan with 23 systems (down from 30) and China with 13 systems (down from 18).
In Europe, the UK has established itself as the No. 1 with 43 systems (32 six months ago). Germany has to live with the No. 2 spot with 24 systems (19 six month ago).

Trends

A paper^[1] made available in early 2007 presents the results of some statistical analysis 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.

Systems of interest

The MDGRAPE-3 supercomputer reportedly reached a one Petaflop calculation speed, faster than any of those on the TOP500 list, though it does not qualify as a general-purpose supercomputer, and cannot run the benchmarking software used to gauge the speeds computed for the list.

Grid computing systems are also not included on the list.

References

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

External links

computer is a machine which manipulates data according to a list of instructions.

Computers take numerous physical forms. The first devices that resemble modern computers date to the mid-20th century (around 1940 - 1941), although the computer concept and various machines
..... Click the link for more information.

For other uses, see Supercomputer (disambiguation).

A supercomputer is a computer that led the world (or was close to doing so) in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction.
..... Click the link for more information.

LINPACK is a software library for performing numerical linear algebra on digital computers. It was written in Fortran by Jack Dongarra, Jim Bunch, Cleve Moler, and Pete Stewart, and was intended for use on supercomputers in the 1970s and early 1980s.
..... Click the link for more information.

benchmark is the act of running a computer program, a set of programs, or other operations, in order to assess the relative performance of an object, normally by running a number of standard tests and trials against it.
..... Click the link for more information.

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] .
..... Click the link for more information.

University of Mannheim is one of the younger German universities. Though it sees its roots back to the Kurpfälzische Akademie der Wissenschaften of 1763, the actual university was founded in 1907 as college for economics.
..... Click the link for more information.

Jack Dongarra is a University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department [1] at the University of Tennessee. He holds the position of a Distinguished Research Staff member in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge
..... Click the link for more information.

The University of Tennessee (UT), sometimes called the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (UT Knoxville or UTK), is the flagship institution of the statewide land-grant University of Tennessee public university system in the American state of Tennessee.
..... Click the link for more information.

Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Motto View into the future
Established August 26, 1931
Research Type Unclassified
Budget $500 million

Director Steve Chu

Staff 4000
Students 800

Location Berkeley, CA
..... Click the link for more information.

Blue Gene is a computer architecture project designed to produce several next-generation supercomputers, designed to reach operating speeds in the PFLOPS (petaFLOPS) range, and currently reaching sustained speeds over 360 TFLOPS (teraFLOPS).
..... Click the link for more information.

Not to be confused with the videogame, SimEarth.

The Earth Simulator (ES) was the fastest supercomputer in the world from 2002 to 2004.
..... Click the link for more information.

ASCI White was a supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

It was a computer cluster based on IBM's commercial RS/6000 SP computer. 512 of these machines were connected together for ASCI White, with 16 processors per node and 8,192 processors
..... Click the link for more information.

ASCI Red or ASCI Option Red, was a supercomputer installed at Sandia National Laboratories, located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. ASCI Red became operational in 1997 and was retired from service in September, 2005.
..... Click the link for more information.

The Intel Paragon was a series of massively parallel supercomputers produced by Intel. The Paragon XP/S was a productized version of the experimental Touchstone Delta system built at CalTech, launched in 1992.
..... Click the link for more information.

Dresden

Coat of arms Location

..... Click the link for more information.

Anthem
"Das Lied der Deutschen" (third stanza)
also called "Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit"
..... Click the link for more information.

For other uses, see Flop.

In computing, FLOPS (or flops or flop/s) is an acronym meaning FLoating point Operations Per Second.
..... Click the link for more information.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Motto "Science in the national interest"
Established 1952 by the University of California
Research Type National security and basic science
Budget $1.6 billion/year

Director George H.
..... Click the link for more information.

Motto
"In God We Trust" (since 1956)
"E Pluribus Unum" ("From Many, One"; Latin, traditional)
Anthem
..... Click the link for more information.

Power Architecture is a broad term to describe similar instruction sets for RISC microprocessors developed and manufactured by such companies as IBM, Freescale, AMCC, Tundra and P.A. Semi. The governing body is Power.org, comprising over 40 companies and organisations.
..... Click the link for more information.

International Business Machines Corporation

Public (NYSE: IBM )
Founded 1889, incorporated 1911
Headquarters Armonk, New York, USA

Key people Samuel J.
..... Click the link for more information.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a multiprogram science and technology national laboratory managed for the United States Department of Energy by UT-Battelle, LLC. ORNL is located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, near Knoxville.
..... Click the link for more information.

The Cray XT4 (codenamed Hood during development) is an updated version of the Cray XT3 supercomputer. It was released on November 18, 2006. It includes an updated version of the SeaStar interconnect router called SeaStar2, processor sockets for Socket AM2 Opteron
..... Click the link for more information.

The Opteron is AMD's x86 server processor line, and was the first processor to implement the AMD64 instruction set architecture (known generically as x86-64). It was released on April 22, 2003 with the SledgeHammer
..... Click the link for more information.

Cray Inc.

Public (NASDAQ: CRAY )
Founded 1972 as Cray Research, Inc.
Founder Seymour Cray
Headquarters Seattle, Washington

Products Supercomputers
Website cray.com
Cray Inc.
..... Click the link for more information.

Sandia National Laboratories, which is managed and operated by the Sandia Corporation (a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation), is a major United States Department of Energy research and development national laboratory with two locations, one in Albuquerque, New
..... Click the link for more information.

Red Storm is a supercomputer architecture designed for the ASCI Thor's Hammer supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratory by Cray, Inc.^[1] The architecture was later productized as the Cray XT3.

It was announced on July 27, 2004.
..... Click the link for more information.

This article is copied from an article on Wikipedia.org - the free encyclopedia created and edited by online user community. The text was not checked or edited by anyone on our staff. Although the vast majority of the wikipedia encyclopedia articles provide accurate and timely information please do not assume the accuracy of any particular article. This article is distributed under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License.

Herod_Archelaus