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The TOP500 is compiled two times a year. In Heidelberg, the 21st list is presented. As a yardstick it uses the Linpack benchmark. Lots of other data are collected too, like manufacturer, type of machine, installation type and peak performance. The peak performance is often much higher than the Linpack performance. But on real applications the peak performance is never attained. There is a main TOP500 web site where you can see the recent list and all the pervious ones. You can also do your own analysis using the databases.
Earth Simulator is still number 1. Meuer does not see any competition for this machine's position for the next two years. Till June 2005 it will be number 1. Perhaps then, ASCI Purple could take over. ASCI Purple is under development by IBM.
The second place in today's list is the ASCI-Q machine at Los Alamos. It is an HP Alpha server. They especially squeezed out the best Linpack performance they could get, to get a high position in this list.
On third place is an MCR Linux Cluster Xeon 2.4 GHz - Quadrics cluster produced by Linux Networx/Quadrics at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Already 1/3 of the TOP500 are Linux clusters today, growing rapidly. They could dominate completely the list in 2005, Meuer said.
At position 7 is the first Fujitsu system: a Primepower HPC2500 (1.3 GHz) at the National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan. The first Itanium based system is at position 8.
The first and only machine in Europe in the TOP10 is at position 10: a Hewlett-Packard AlphaServer SC ES45/1 GHz 3980 at the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA) Bruyeres-le-Chatel in France.
Aggregrate performance of all TOP500 machines combined is 375 Tflop/s. The number one, the Earth Simulator has 10% of that: 35.86 Tflop/s.
From the list extrapolation, Meuer predicts that in 2005, the top machine will have a performance of 100 Tflop/s. Only Tflop/s machines will make it to the list by then. Before the end of the decade, we will see a Pflop/s (Petaflop/s) system, Meuer predicts.
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