Top 500 List Released; Tungsten in Top 10
released 06.21.04
Contact
Trish Barker
NCSA Public Information Specialist
tlbarker@ncsa.uiuc.edu
217.265.8013
MANNHEIM, GERMANY; KNOXVILLE, TN; BERKELEY, CA —
The 23rd edition of the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers was released today (June 23) at the International Supercomputer Conference in Heidelberg, Germany.
The Earth Simulator supercomputer, built by NEC and installed in 2002 at the Earth Simulator Center in Yokohama, Japan, retains the No. 1 position with a Linpack benchmark performance of 35.86 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second).
The Mercury system at NCSA, which is part of the TeraGrid, debuts on the list with a peak performance of 10.25 teraflops, while the Tungsten Linux cluster remains in the top 10 (No. 5) with a peak performance of 15.3 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second).
Highlights from the Top 10
A new No. 2 system: Thunder, an Intel Itanium 2-based cluster system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California.
At No. 4 and No. 8 are the prototypes for the upcoming IBM BlueGene/L system. The prototypes are a joint development of LLNL and IBM and are currently at IBM's facility. The final system will be installed at LLNL and is expected to supplant the Earth Simulator by June 2005, perhaps even by the end of 2004.
The No. 6 system is a new IBM p690 system with 1.9 GHz Power4+ processors. The first such system in the world, it is installed at the ECMWF in UK and brings Europe back into the top 10. It also reflects the fact that, for the first time in a long time, the UK has surpassed Germany as the European country with the most TOP500 systems—36 to 34.
No. 7 is a second Japanese system built by Fujitsu and installed at RIKEN. It merits special attention as it is a heterogeneous cluster with nodes of different capabilities, which makes it more challenging to achieve good overall performance. It is the first such system to rise so high in the TOP500.
No. 10 is the first Chinese system ever to enter the top 10. Assembled by a Chinese integrator, Dawning, the computer is based on AMD's Opteron chip and Los Angeles-based Myricom's Myrinet interconnect network.
The performance of the No. 10-ranked system jumped to 8.06 teraflops, up from 6.6 teraflops in the last list. The Linux Networx-built, Opteron-based cluster at Los Alamos National Laboratory, with 8.05 teraflops, only reached No. 11.
The "SuperMac" at Virginia Tech, which made an impressive debut six months ago, is off the latest list, but the absence is likely to be only temporary. Virginia Tech is replacing hardware and the new hardware was not in place for the compiling of this TOP500 list.
General trends
The number of systems exceeding the 1 teraflop mark on the Linpack benchmark jumped from 130 to 242—almost half the list.
The 500th system on the list, with 624 gigaflops, was listed at No. 242 in the previous TOP500 just six months ago. This marks a record turnover rate in the 11-year history of the TOP500. The lowest-ranked system six months ago was 403.4 gigaflops.
The entry point for the top 100 moved from 1.142 teraflops to 1.922 teraflops.
Total accumulated performance, 813 teraflops, is approaching the level of a petaflops. This compares with a total of 528 teraflops six months ago.
A total of 287 systems are now using Intel processors. Six months ago, there were 189 Intel-based systems on the list and one year ago only 119. The second most common processors are IBM Power processor (75 systems) ahead of HP’s PA-RISC processors (57) and AMD processors (34).
There are 291 systems now labeled as clusters, up from 208 in November 2003. This makes clustered systems the most common architecture in the TOP500.
At present, IBM and Hewlett-Packard sell the bulk of systems at all performance levels of the TOP500. IBM became the clear leader in this edition of the TOP500 list, with 44.8 percent of the systems and 50.12 percent of installed performance. HP is second with 28 percent of the systems and 18.5 percent of total performance. No other manufacturer is able to capture more than 6 percent in any category.
The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee.
For the complete list and more information, see http://www.top500.org/.
