Europe doing well in upper regions TOP500 supercomputer list

San Jose, 15 November 97 In the November 1997 issue of the TOP500 supercomputer sites, three of the first ten machines are located in Europe. In fact, the number 9 to 14 all have the same performance. From these 14 machines, 5 are located in Europe. First machine in the TOP500 is still the ASCI Red machine at Sandia Labs, USA, second is a Cray Y3E at a classified US site and third is a Cray T3E at UK Meteorological Office. First Japanes machine is a Hitachi/Tsukuba machine located at the University of Tsukuba. All 500 machines together represent a computing power of 17 Tflop/s, a quarter of which is available on the European continent.

About a quarter of the TOP500 machines are located in Europe. More than half of the systems are in the USA/Canada, showing the American domination of the HPC arena.

Distribution of machines

If we compare the overall installed performance, there is not much difference, except that Japan clearly houses more powerful machines on the average.

Performance distribution

The vendor scene is still dominated by Cray/SGI: they have somewhat less than half the systems installed. SUN is second world wide, followed by IBM and Fujitsu. In Europe, HP holds the fourth place. There is no European vendor present in the list.

+Vendordistribution

The following tables summarize the most important statistics.

Manufacturer World wide Europe
SGI/Cray 217 48
SUN 87 26
IBM 75 19
Fujitsu 30 8
NEC 27 7
HP 26 9
Hitachi 15 1
Intel 13 2
Others 10
500 120

Vendors in the TOP500

Continent Number of machines Rmax performance Tflop/s
Europe 120 4.1
USA/Canada 269 9.0
Japan 92 3.5
Others 19 0.3
500 16.9

Distribution over continents

The European TOP10 is completely dominated by T3E systems. Only the Fujitsu machine at ECMWF was able to reach a second place. Germany and the UK are the European countries that have the most machines in the uppermost region of the TOP500.

Europe World Vendor System Rmax Site Country Application # proc.
1 3 SGI/Cray T3E900 LC840-128 430300 United Kingdom Meteorological Office UK Research 840
2 8 Fujitsu VPP700/116 213000 ECMWF UK Research 116
3 9 SGI/Cray T3E LC672-128 196100 Max-Planck-Gesellschaft MPI/IPP Germany Research 672
4 11 SGI/Cray T3E LC512-128 196100 Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) Germany Research 512
5 14 SGI/Cray T3E LC512-128 196100 Universitaet Stuttgart Germany Research 512
6 16 SGI/Cray T3E LC400-128 153400 Deutscher Wetterdienst Germany Research 400
7 20 SGI/Cray T3E900 LC256-128 138700 Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) Germany Research 256
8 23 SGI/Cray T3E900 LC256-128 138700 University of Edinburgh UK Academic 256
9 25 SGI/Cray T3E750 LC280-128 125350 Commissariat a l Energie Atomique (CEA) France Research 280
10 31 SGI/Cray T3E750 LC224-128 101060 CSC (Center for Scientific Computing) Finland Academic 224

The TOP10 computers in Europe.

For the complete list of the world's most powerful machines, check in at the TOP500 web site.

Ad Emmen