20th Edition of TOP500 List of World's Fastest Supercomputers ReleasedMannheim, Knoxville, Berkely 15 November 2002 In what has become a much-anticipated event in the world of high-performance computing, the 20th edition of the "TOP500" list of the world's fastest supercomputers was released today (November 15, 2002). The Earth Simulator supercomputer installed earlier this year at the Earth Simulator Center in Yokohama, Japan, is with its Linpack benchmark performance of 35.86 Tflop/s (trillions of calculations per second) retains the number one position. The #2 and #3 positions are held by two new, identical ASCI Q systems at Los Alamos National Laboratory (7.73 Tflop/s each). These systems are built by Hewlett-Packard and based on the AlphaServer SC computer system.
For the first time ever, 2 PC-based clusters were able to gain a top 10 spot. At position 5 is a cluster at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory built by Linux NetworkX and Quadrics. At position 8 is a cluster at the Forecast Systems Laboratory at NOAA built by HPTi with a Myrinet interconnect.
The new TOP500 list, as well as the former lists, can be found on the Web at http://www.top500.org/.
Gaining entry into the top 10 positions on the new list now requires achieving a Linpack performance of more than 3.2 Tflop/s. Already 47 systems are reported to exceed Linpack performance of 1 Tflop/s. Clearly, Teraflop-level systems are in widespread use now.
Performance levels at all positions of the TOP500 list keep growing impressively driven by Moore's Law. The total combined performance of all 500 computers on the list is 293 Tflop/s, compared to 222 Tflop/s just six months ago. The "slowest" system on the newest listing is now 195.8 Gflop/s (billions of calculations per second), compared to 134.3 Gflop/s six months ago.
In terms of total performance of all the installed systems, the latest TOP500 edition shows IBM as still the clear leader with 31.8 percent, ahead of HP with 22.1 percent and NEC with 14.6 percent.
For the second time, Hewlett-Packard is the leader in terms of the number of systems on the list, with 137 installed systems - only slightly ahead of IBM with 131 systems. Sun is third in this category with 88 systems. No other company was able to gain more than 10 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 and will be presented in detail at the SC2002 Conference in Baltimore, MD, which starts Saturday, Nov. 16, and continues through Friday, Nov. 22.
A total of 55 Intel-based and eight AMD-based PC clusters are now present in the TOP500. The number of clusters in the TOP500 grew again to a total of 93 systems. Fourteen of these clusters are labeled as 'Self-Made' as they are designed and assembled by the end users themselves.
The number of systems reported at industrial customers fell slightly to 226 systems, down from 248 six months ago and 261 one year ago.
Seven of the TOP10 systems, 46% of all 500 systems, and 51% of the total performance are installed in the United States. Also 91% of all 500 systems are produced in the United States. These market shares demonstrate the leadership of the U.S. in the usage and production of High Performance Computing.
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