The fastest computers
The TOP500 table shows the 500 most powerful commercially available computer systems known to the public.
The authors of the ranking in a transparent way provide a range of information on comparable computers. In the TOP500 List the computers are ordered first by their Rmax value, which means maximal LINPACK performance achieved. The benchmark used in the LINPACK Benchmark is to solve a dense system of linear equations, which is widely used to measure performance of computers and available for almost all relevant systems. These reports are snapshots of the state of supercomputer installations in the world. The first report was published in June 1993 and is updated twice a year (June and November).
From June 2011 on the top of the list of supercomputers is a Japanese supercomputer, which is capable of performing more than 8 quadrillion calculations per second (petaflop/s). The best systems in the world are presented below.
Installation site | Computer | Year | Cores | RMAX |
RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS), Japan | K computer, SPARC64 VIIIfx 2.0GHz, Tofu interconnect | 2011 | 548 352 | 8 162,00 |
National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China | Tianhe-1A - NUDT TH MPP, X5670 2.93Ghz 6C, NVIDIA GPU, FT-1000 8C | 2010 | 186 368 | 2 566,00 |
DOE/SC/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, United States | Jaguar - Cray XT5-HE Opteron 6-core 2.6 GHz | 2009 | 224 162 | 1 759,00 |
National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen (NSCS), China | Nebulae - Dawning TC3600 Blade, Intel X5650, NVidia Tesla C2050 GPU | 2010 | 120 640 | 1 271,00 |
GSIC Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan | TSUBAME 2.0 - HP ProLiant SL390s G7 Xeon 6C X5670, Nvidia GPU, Linux/Windows | 2010 | 73 278 | 1 192,00 |
DOE/NNSA/LANL/SNL, United States | Cielo - Cray XE6 8-core 2.4 GHz | 2011 | 142 272 | 1 110,00 |
NASA/Ames Research Center/NAS, United States | Pleiades - SGI Altix ICE 8200EX/8400EX, Xeon HT QC 3.0/Xeon 5570/5670 2.93 Ghz, Infiniband | 2011 | 111 104 | 1 088,00 |
DOE/SC/LBNL/NERSC, United States | Hopper - Cray XE6 12-core 2.1 GHz | 2010 | 153 408 | 1 054,00 |
Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA), France | Tera-100 - Bull bullx super-node S6010/S6030 | 2010 | 138 368 | 1 050,00 |
DOE/NNSA/LANL, United States | Roadrunner - BladeCenter QS22/LS21 Cluster, PowerXCell 8i 3.2 Ghz / Opteron DC 1.8 GHz, Voltaire Infiniband | 2009 | 122 400 | 1 042,00 |
Source: www.top500.org/list/2011/06/100 28.10.2011
In the following list you can compare countries with the highest GDP and number of supercomputers installed.
Country | GDP Rank | TOP 100 | TOP 500 | Total share % |
United States | 1 | 41 | 255 | 51,0 |
China | 2 | 6 | 61 | 12,2 |
Japan | 3 | 8 | 26 | 5,2 |
Germany | 4 | 9 | 30 | 6,0 |
France | 5 | 9 | 25 | 5,0 |
United Kingdom | 6 | 5 | 27 | 5,4 |
Brazil | 7 | 1 | 2 | 0,4 |
Italy | 8 | 2 | 5 | 1,0 |
Canada | 9 | 2 | 8 | 1,6 |
India | 10 | 1 | 2 | 0,4 |
Russia | 11 | 4 | 12 | 2,4 |
Spain | 12 | 0 | 2 | 0,4 |
Australia | 13 | 1 | 6 | 1,2 |
Mexico | 14 | 0 | 0 | 0,0 |
South Korea | 15 | 3 | 4 | 0,8 |
Netherlands | 16 | 0 | 1 | 0,2 |
Turkey | 17 | 0 | 0 | 0,0 |
Indonesia | 18 | 0 | 0 | 0,0 |
Switzerland | 19 | 1 | 4 | 0,8 |
Poland | 20 | 1 | 5 | 1,0 |
Others | - | 6 | 25 | 5,0 |
Source: www.top500.org/list/2011/06/100 28.10.2011
Apart of computation power and country where the computers are installed, another key information is the origin of vendors. The list of manufacturers of supercomputers, which is shown bellowed, is dominated by companies established in the United States.
Source: top500.org/charts/list/37/vendors
Taking into account the ecological trends, in 2008 was created as a complement to the TOP500, the Green500. The ranking classifies the world's supercomputers by performance-per-watt. On the top of the list of the most energy-efficient supercomputers are two versions of IBM Blue Gene/Q prototype supercomputers. Both are installed in IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center (United States). In the TOP500 the computers are classified on 109 and 165 positions.
You can find full reports and more detailed information about world’s supercomputers in following websites:
- www.top500.org
- www.green500.org
