17th Edition of TOP500 List of World"s Fastest Supercomputers ReleasedHeidelberg 21 jun 2001 In what has become a much-anticipated event in the world of high-performance computing, the 17th edition of the "TOP500" list of the world? fastest supercomputers was released today (June 21). The latest edition of the twice-yearly ranking finds IBM as the leader in the field, with 40 percent in terms of installed systems and 43 percent in terms of total performance of all the installed systems. In second place in terms of installed systems is Sun Microsystems with 16 percent, while Cray Inc. retained second place in terms of performance (13 percent). SGI Inc. was third both with respect to systems with 63 (12.6 percent) and performance (10.2 percent).
The list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the U.S. Department of Energyճ National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee. The list was released and analyzed at the Supercomputer 2001 Conference in Heidelberg.
At the top of the list, the U.S. Department of Energyճ Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), which had claimed the top four slots on the previous TOP500 list, is now joined by the Department of Energyճ National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), an unclassified supercomputing center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley, Calif.
The IBM ASCI White system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is still the number one supercomputer in the world, with an improved performance of 7.2 teraflop/s (trillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark. The number two spot is now taken by the new IBM SP system at NERSC/LBNL. At number five is a new Hitachi SR8000/MPP at the University of Tokyo.
The list now indicates 12 systems exceeding the 1 teraflop/s level using the Linpack benchmark. The number eight system is an NEC SX5 at Osaka University and is the first classical vector system to break the 1 teraflop/s (Tflop/s) barrier.
The TOP500 already contains 25 systems exceeding 1 teraflop/s level for peak performance. Two of these systems are IBM Netfinity clusters at NCSA and Shell, at numbers 30 and 31 respectively.
The list exhibits unbroken growth at all ranges of performance. The total combined performance of all 500 computers on the list is 108.8 Tflop/s, compared to 88.1 Tflop/s six month ago. Increased performance also resulted in 132 systems which had made the previous list failing to make the latest edition. The "slowest" system on the newest listing is 67.8 gigaflop/s, compared to 55.1 Gflop/s 6 months ago and 43.82 Gflop/s in June 2000.
The new TOP500 list, as well as the former lists, can be found on the Web at http://www.top500.org/.
According to the compilers of the list, the following trends can be seen:
Erich Strohmaier |
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