19th Edition of TOP500 list of world's fastest supercomputers releasedMannheim 12 jun 2002 In what has become a much-anticipated event in the world of high-performance computing, the 19th edition of the "TOP500" list of the world's fastest supercomputers was released today. The recently installed Earth Simulator supercomputer at the Earth Simulator Center in Yokohama, Japan, is, as expected, the clear new number 1. Its performance of 35.86 Tflop/s (trillions of calculations per second) running the Linpack benchmark is almost five times higher than the performance of the now no. 2 IBM ASCI White system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (7.2 Tflop/s). This powerful leapfrogging to the top by a system so much faster than the previous top system is unparalleled in the history of the TOP500.
Hypothetically one would need to combine the next 12 systems on the TOP500 to match the performance of the Earth Simulator system built by NEC. Its architecture is largely based on the NEC SX-6 line of vector-systems, which are sold in the USA by Cray Inc. The size of the Earth Simulator can be illustrated by the fact that before the June 1999 TOP500 list, the sum of all 500 systems on this biannual list was smaller than 30 Tflop/s and thus did not exceed the performance level of the Earth Simulator.
The latest edition of the TOP500 finds Hewlett-Packard as the leader in the field, with 168 installed systems - only slightly ahead of IBM with 164 systems. The merger of Hewlett-Packard and Compaq is one of the main reasons for HP being ahead of IBM. The number of installed systems has actually changed only little compared to six months ago, if HP and Compaq are considered together.
In terms of total performance of all the installed systems IBM is still the clear leader with 33.3 percent, ahead of HP with 22.2 percent and NEC with 19 percent. No other company was able to gain more than 8 percent in either of these two categories.
The list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee. The list was released today at the ISC2002 Conference in Heidelberg, Germany.
The list exhibits unbroken growth at all ranges of performance. The total combined performance of all 500 computers on the list is 222 Tflop/s, compared to 134.4 Tflop/s six months ago. The "slowest" system on the newest listing is now 134.3 Gflop/s (billions of calculations per second), compared to 94.3 Gflop/s 6 months ago. The list now indicates 23 systems exceeding the 1 Tflop/s level using the Linpack benchmark. The TOP500 already contains 70 systems exceeding 1 Tflop/s level for peak performance.
A total of 42 Intel-based and 7 AMD-based PC clusters are now present in the TOP500. Thirty-one of the Intel-based PC clusters are IBM Netfinity systems delivered by IBM. A substantial number of these are installed at industrial sites, especially in the oil-industry. Together with five SunSparc and five Alpha-based clusters and 21 HP AlphaServers, the number of clusters in the TOP500 grew impressively to a total of 80 systems. Fourteen of these clusters are labeled as 'Self-Made' as they are designed and assembled by the end users themselves.
HP captured the major part of the high-end Telecom market (about 2/3 of systems and IBM and Sun each about 1/6).
Eight of the TOP10 systems are installed in the United States, which demonstrates the leadership of the U.S. in the usage of High Performance Computing.
The new TOP500 list, as well as the former lists, can be found on the Web at http://www.top500.org/.
Erich Strohmaier |
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