16th Edition of TOP500 supercomputer sites releasedMannheim, Germany and Knoxville, TN and Berkeley, CA 02 November 2000 The 16th edition of the TOP500 list of the most powerful Supercomputer, compiled by Hans Meuer, Erich Strohmaier, Jack Dongarra, and Horst D. Simon released in time for SC2000 sees IBM establish itself as current leader of this list. One year after IBM became the leader in the TOP500 IBM is now able to gain a share of 43% with respect to the number of installed systems as well as installed performance up from 29% only 6 months ago. Second in the number of systems is again Sun with 18% while Cray Inc. is holding on to the number 2 spot in performance with 16%.
US DOE ASCI systems are claiming the first four positions of the
TOP500. The new IBM ASCI White system at Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory is the new number one with 4.9 TFlop/s Linpack performance.
This system is build with 512 nodes, each of which contains 16 IBM
Power3 processors using a shared memory. This type of hierarchical
architecture is more and more common for systems used in HPC.
In addition to the four DOE ASCI systems there are now three more
systems exceeding the 1 TFlop/s level on the Linpack benchmark (2
built by IBM and 1 by Hitachi). The TOP500 already contains 18
systems exceeding 1 TFlop/s peak performance. One of these systems is
in commercial use. It is an IBM SP system at position 15 installed at
Charles Schwab.
The list exhibits an unbroken growth at all ranges of performance.
231 systems fell off the TOP500 since last June due to the increase in
the entry level. The last entry of the TOP500 list shows now a
performance rate of 55.1 GFlop/s compared to 43.82 GFlop/s 6 months ago
and 33.09 GFlop/s in November 1999.
All remaining vector systems on the TOP500 are built by Japanese
manufacturers. These are 23 NEC SX system, 17 Fujitsu VPP systems, and
10 Hitachi SR8000 pseudo-vector systems. The NEC SX systems are also
the only remaining systems with physically flat shared memory.
The number of "Clusters" built with commodity parts and small SMP
nodes with less then 16 processors is on the rise with now 28 such
systems listed compared to only 7 one year ago. These systems include
clusters of Compaq AlphaServer, Sun HPC systems, the IBM PC based
LosLobos cluster, and 7 self-made clusters built with Alpha or Intel
based PCs. A detailed analysis of the new TOP500 and current plans for further
improvements of this project will be presented at the SC2000 in the
traditional BOF session in Room D263-265 at 5:30 PM on Wednesday,
November 8. The new TOP500 list, as well as the former lists, are available at
http://www.top500.org/
Hans Meuer, Erich Strohmaier, Jack Dongarra, Horst D. Simon |
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