TOP500 List Highlights - November 2005

All changes are from June 2005 to November 2005

Highlights from the Top 10

  • The list shows again a major shake-up of the TOP10

  • Only six of the TOP10 systems from November 2004 are still large enough to hold on to a TOP10 position, four new systems entered the top tier.

  • The new and previous No. 1 is DOE's IBM BlueGene/L system, installed at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). It has doubled in size (again) and has now achieved a record Linpack performance of 280.6 TFlop/s. It is still the only system ever to exceed the 100 TFlop/s mark.

  • The No. 2 is a similar but smaller IBM eServer Blue Gene Solution system, installed at IBM's Thomas Watson Research Center with 91.20 TFlop/s Linpack performance.

  • The new No. 3 is the ASCI Purple system at LLNL, also built by IBM , but based on the pSeries 575 servers. It reached 63.4 TFlop/s.

  • The Columbia system at NASA/Ames built by SGI slipped to the No. 4 spot, with a still equally impressive 51.87 TFlop/s.

  • Two systems at DOE's Sandia National Laboratories occupy Nos. 5 and 6. A new PowerEdge-based Dell system outperformed the enlarged ASCI Red Storm system by a narrow margin with 36.10 Tflops/s versus 35.86 Tflop/s.

  • The Earth Simulator, built by NEC, which held the No. 1 spot for five lists, has now slipped to No. 7.

  • The No. 10 spot is occupied by a Cray XT3 system at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory with 20.53 Tflop/s. This is also the new entry level for the TOP10, up from just under 10 TFlop/s Linpack performance one year ago.

General highlights from the Top 500 since the last edition

  • The entry level to the list moved up to the 1.646 TFlop/s mark on the Linpack benchmark, compared to 1.166 TFlop/s six months ago..

  • The last system on the list would have been listed at position 279 in the last TOP500 just six months ago. This is a larger turnover than average for the TOP500.

  • Total accumulated performance has grown to 2.30 PFlop/s, compared to 1.69 PFlop/s six months ago and 1.127 PFlop/s one year ago.

  • The entry point for the top 100 increased in six months from 3.41 TFlop/s to 3.98 TFlop/s.

  • A total of 333 systems are now using Intel processors, which is unchanged from six months ago.

  • Intel's EM64T processors are well received in the HPC community and already 81 systems listed are based on them, well ahead of Itanium 2-based systems (46).

  • The second most common processor family is the IBM Power processor (73 systems), ahead of the AMD Opteron processor (55 systemsm up from 25 six months ago). FiveOpteron-based systems use the new dual core chip version.

  • 360 systems are labeled as clusters, making this the most common architecture in the TOP500.

  • Half of the listed systems (249) are now using Gigabit Ethernet as the internal system interconnect technology, ahead of Myricoms Myrinet with 70 systems.

  • At present, IBM and Hewlett-Packard sell the bulk of systems at all performance levels of the TOP500.

  • IBM remains the clear leader in the TOP500 list with 43.8 percent of systems (down from 51.8 percent) and 52.8 percent of installed performance (down from 57.9 percent).

  • HP is second with 33.8 percent of systems (up from 26.2 percent) and 18.8 percent of performance (up from 13.3 percent).

  • No other manufacturer is able to capture more than 7 percent in any category.

  • The U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 305 of the 500 systems.. The European (100 systems) and Asian share (66 systems) is slowly decreasing.

  • The number of systems installed in the U.S. has increased to 305, up from 294 six months ago and 267 one year ago.

  • Dominant countries in Asia are Japan with 21 systems (down from 23) and China with 17 systems (down from 19).

  • In Europe, Germany lost the No. 1 spot again to the UK, with now 24 systems compared to 41. Six months ago, Germany was in the lead with 40 compared to the UK's 32 systems.