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The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non- distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the
supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...
s twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the
International Supercomputing Conference The ISC High Performance, formerly known as the International Supercomputing Conference, is a yearly conference on supercomputing which has been held in Europe since 1986. It stands as the oldest supercomputing conference in the world. History ...
in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL benchmarks, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers. The most recent edition of TOP500 was published in June 2025 as the 65th edition of TOP500, while the next edition of TOP500 will be published in November 2025 as the 66th edition of TOP500. As of June 2025, the United States'
El Capitan El Capitan (; ) is a vertical Rock formations in the United States, rock formation in Yosemite National Park, on the north side of Yosemite Valley, near its western end. The El Capitan Granite, granite monolith is about from base to summit alo ...
is the most powerful supercomputer in the TOP500, reaching 1742
petaFlops Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measu ...
(1.742 exaFlops) on the LINPACK benchmarks. As of 2025, the United States has by far the highest share of total computing power on the list (nearly 50%). As of 2025, the United States has the highest number of systems with 174 supercomputers; China is in second place with 46, and Germany is third at 43. The 59th edition of TOP500, published in June 2022, was the first edition of TOP500 to feature only 64-bit supercomputers; as of June 2022, 32-bit supercomputers are no longer listed. The TOP500 list is compiled by Jack Dongarra of the
University of Tennessee The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (or The University of Tennessee; UT; UT Knoxville; or colloquially UTK or Tennessee) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Knoxville, Tennessee, United St ...
,
Knoxville Knoxville is a city in Knox County, Tennessee, United States, and its county seat. It is located on the Tennessee River and had a population of 190,740 at the 2020 United States census. It is the largest city in the East Tennessee Grand Division ...
, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the
National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a high-performance computing (supercomputer) research facility that was founded in 1974. The National User Facility is operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for th ...
(NERSC) and
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL, Berkeley Lab) is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in the Berkeley Hills, hills of Berkeley, California, United States. Established i ...
(LBNL), and, until his death in 2014, Hans Meuer of the
University of Mannheim The University of Mannheim (German: ''Universität Mannheim''), abbreviated UMA, is a public university, public research university in Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Founded in 1967, the university has its origins in the ''Palatine Aca ...
,
Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...
. The TOP500 project also includes lists such as
Green500 The Green500 is a biannual ranking of supercomputers, from the TOP500 list of supercomputers, in terms of energy efficiency. The list measures performance per watt using the TOP500 measure of high performance LINPACK benchmarks at double-preci ...
(measuring energy efficiency) and HPCG (measuring I/O bandwidth).


History

In the early 1990s, a new definition of ''supercomputer'' was needed to produce meaningful statistics. After experimenting with metrics based on processor count in 1992, the idea arose at the
University of Mannheim The University of Mannheim (German: ''Universität Mannheim''), abbreviated UMA, is a public university, public research university in Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Founded in 1967, the university has its origins in the ''Palatine Aca ...
to use a detailed listing of installed systems as the basis. In early 1993, Jack Dongarra was persuaded to join the project with his
LINPACK benchmarks The LINPACK benchmarks are a measure of a system's floating-point computing power. Introduced by Jack Dongarra, they measure how fast a computer solves a dense ''n'' × ''n'' system of linear equations ''Ax'' = ''b'', which i ...
. A first test version was produced in May 1993, partly based on data available on the Internet, including the following sources: * "List of the World's Most Powerful Computing Sites" maintained by Gunter Ahrendt * David Kahaner, the director of the Asian Technology Information Program (ATIP); published a report in 1992, titled "Kahaner Report on Supercomputer in Japan" which had an immense amount of data. The information from those sources was used for the first two lists. Since June 1993, the TOP500 is produced bi-annually based on site and vendor submissions only. Since 1993, performance of the ranked position has grown steadily in accordance with
Moore's law Moore's law is the observation that the Transistor count, number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and Forecasting, projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of ...
, doubling roughly every 14 months. In June 2018, ''
Summit A summit is a point on a surface that is higher in elevation than all points immediately adjacent to it. The topographic terms acme, apex, peak (mountain peak), and zenith are synonymous. The term (mountain top) is generally used only for ...
'' was fastest with an Rpeak of 187.6593 P
FLOPS Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measu ...
. For comparison, this is over 1,432,513 times faster than the
Connection Machine The Connection Machine (CM) is a member of a series of massively parallel supercomputers sold by Thinking Machines Corporation. The idea for the Connection Machine grew out of doctoral research on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann arch ...
CM-5/1024 (1,024 cores), which was the fastest system in November 1993 (twenty-five years prior) with an Rpeak of 131.0 G
FLOPS Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measu ...
.


Architecture and operating systems

, all supercomputers on TOP500 are
64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit central processing units (CPU) and arithmetic logic units (ALU) are those that are based on processor registers, a ...
supercomputers, mostly based on CPUs with the
x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit extension of the x86 instruction set architecture, instruction set. It was announced in 1999 and first available in the AMD Opteron family in 2003. It introduces two new ope ...
instruction set architecture In computer science, an instruction set architecture (ISA) is an abstract model that generally defines how software controls the CPU in a computer or a family of computers. A device or program that executes instructions described by that ISA, ...
, 384 of which are
Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...
EMT64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit extension of the x86 instruction set. It was announced in 1999 and first available in the AMD Opteron family in 2003. It introduces two new operating modes: 64-bit mode a ...
-based and 101 of which are
AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...
AMD64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit extension of the x86 instruction set. It was announced in 1999 and first available in the AMD Opteron family in 2003. It introduces two new operating modes: 64-bit mode an ...
-based, with the latter including the top eight supercomputers. 15 other supercomputers are all based on
RISC In electronics and computer science, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer architecture designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a comp ...
architectures, including six based on
ARM64 AArch64, also known as ARM64, is a 64-bit version of the ARM architecture family, a widely used set of computer processor designs. It was introduced in 2011 with the ARMv8 architecture and later became part of the ARMv9 series. AArch64 allows ...
and seven based on the
Power ISA Power ISA is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) currently developed by the OpenPOWER Foundation, led by IBM. It was originally developed by IBM and the now-defunct Power.org industry group. Power IS ...
used by
IBM Power microprocessors Power microprocessors (originally POWER prior to Power10) are designed and sold by IBM for Server (computing), servers and supercomputers. The name "POWER" was originally presented as an acronym for "Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC ...
. In recent years,
heterogeneous computing Heterogeneous computing refers to systems that use more than one kind of processor or core. These systems gain performance or energy efficiency not just by adding the same type of processors, but by adding dissimilar coprocessors, usually incor ...
has dominated the TOP500, mostly using
Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...
's
graphics processing unit A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...
s (GPUs) or Intel's x86-based Xeon Phi as
coprocessor A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor (the CPU). Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating-point arithmetic, graphics, signal processing, string processing, cryptography or ...
s. This is because of better performance per watt ratios and higher absolute performance. AMD GPUs have taken the top 1 and displaced Nvidia in top 10 part of the list. The recent exceptions include the aforementioned Fugaku,
Sunway TaihuLight The Sunway TaihuLight ( ''Shénwēi·tàihú zhī guāng'') is a Chinese supercomputer which, , is ranked 11th in the TOP500 list, with a LINPACK benchmark rating of 93 petaflops. The name is translated as ''divine power, the light of Taihu Lake ...
, and K computer. Tianhe-2A is also an interesting exception, as US sanctions prevented use of Xeon Phi; instead, it was upgraded to use the Chinese-designed Matrix-2000 accelerators. Two computers which first appeared on the list in 2018 were based on architectures new to the TOP500. One was a new x86-64
microarchitecture In electronics, computer science and computer engineering, microarchitecture, also called computer organization and sometimes abbreviated as μarch or uarch, is the way a given instruction set architecture (ISA) is implemented in a particular ...
from Chinese manufacturer Sugon, using Hygon Dhyana CPUs (these resulted from a collaboration with AMD, and are a minor variant of
Zen Zen (; from Chinese: ''Chán''; in Korean: ''Sŏn'', and Vietnamese: ''Thiền'') is a Mahayana Buddhist tradition that developed in China during the Tang dynasty by blending Indian Mahayana Buddhism, particularly Yogacara and Madhyamaka phil ...
-based
AMD EPYC Epyc (stylized as EPYC) is a brand of multi-core x86-64 microprocessors designed and sold by AMD, based on the company's Zen microarchitecture. Introduced in June 2017, they are specifically targeted for the server and embedded system markets ...
) and was ranked 38th, now 117th, and the other was the first ARM-based computer on the list using Cavium ThunderX2 CPUs. Before the ascendancy of
32-bit In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in a maximum of 32- bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform la ...
x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel, based on the 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. Th ...
and later
64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit central processing units (CPU) and arithmetic logic units (ALU) are those that are based on processor registers, a ...
x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit extension of the x86 instruction set architecture, instruction set. It was announced in 1999 and first available in the AMD Opteron family in 2003. It introduces two new ope ...
in the early 2000s, a variety of RISC processor families made up most TOP500 supercomputers, including SPARC, MIPS,
PA-RISC Precision Architecture reduced instruction set computer, RISC (PA-RISC) or Hewlett Packard Precision Architecture (HP/PA or simply HPPA), is a computer, general purpose computer instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Hewlett-Packard f ...
, and
Alpha Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter ''aleph'' , whose name comes from the West Semitic word for ' ...
. All the fastest supercomputers since the Earth Simulator supercomputer have used operating systems based on
Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
. , all the listed supercomputers use an operating system based on the
Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...
. Since November 2015, no computer on the list runs
Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
(while Microsoft reappeared on the list in 2021 with
Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed primarily of free and open-source software. Developed by the British company Canonical (company), Canonical and a community of contributors under a Meritocracy, meritocratic gover ...
based on Linux). In November 2014, Windows Azure cloud computer was no longer on the list of fastest supercomputers (its best rank was 165th in 2012), leaving the Shanghai Supercomputer Center's ''Magic Cube'' as the only Windows-based supercomputer on the list, until it also dropped off the list. It was ranked 436th in its last appearance on the list released in June 2015, while its best rank was 11th in 2008. There are no longer any
Mac OS Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc. in a succession of two major series. In 1984, Apple debuted the operating system that is now known as the classic Mac OS with its release of the original Macintosh System Software. The system ...
computers on the list. It had at most five such systems at a time, one more than the Windows systems that came later, while the total performance share for Windows was higher. Their relative performance share of the whole list was however similar, and never high for either. In 2004, the System X supercomputer based on
Mac OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...
(
Xserve The Xserve is a discontinued series of rack-mounted servers that was manufactured by Apple Inc. between 2002 and 2011. It was Apple's first rack-mounted server, and could function as a file server, web server or run high-performance computing ...
, with 2,200
PowerPC 970 The PowerPC 970, PowerPC 970FX, and PowerPC 970MP are 64-bit PowerPC CPUs from IBM introduced in 2002. Apple branded the 970 as PowerPC G5 for its Power Mac G5. Having created the PowerPC architecture in the early 1990s via the AIM alliance, t ...
processors) once ranked 7th place. It has been well over a decade since MIPS systems dropped entirely off the list though the Gyoukou supercomputer that jumped to 4th place in November 2017 had a MIPS-based design as a small part of the coprocessors. Use of 2,048-core coprocessors (plus 8× 6-core MIPS, for each, that "no longer require to rely on an external Intel Xeon E5 host processor") made the supercomputer much more energy efficient than the other top 10 (i.e. it was 5th on
Green500 The Green500 is a biannual ranking of supercomputers, from the TOP500 list of supercomputers, in terms of energy efficiency. The list measures performance per watt using the TOP500 measure of high performance LINPACK benchmarks at double-preci ...
and other such ''ZettaScaler-2.2''-based systems take first three spots). At 19.86 million cores, it was by far the largest system by core-count, with almost double that of the then-best manycore system, the Chinese
Sunway TaihuLight The Sunway TaihuLight ( ''Shénwēi·tàihú zhī guāng'') is a Chinese supercomputer which, , is ranked 11th in the TOP500 list, with a LINPACK benchmark rating of 93 petaflops. The name is translated as ''divine power, the light of Taihu Lake ...
.


TOP500

, the number one supercomputer is
El Capitan El Capitan (; ) is a vertical Rock formations in the United States, rock formation in Yosemite National Park, on the north side of Yosemite Valley, near its western end. The El Capitan Granite, granite monolith is about from base to summit alo ...
, the leader on Green500 is JEDI, a Bull Sequana XH3000 system using the Nvidia Grace Hopper GH200 Superchip. In June 2022, the top 4 systems of Graph500 used both AMD CPUs and AMD accelerators. After an upgrade, for the 56th TOP500 in November 2020, Summit, a previously fastest supercomputer, is currently highest-ranked IBM-made supercomputer; with IBM POWER9 CPUs. Sequoia became the last IBM Blue Gene/Q model to drop completely off the list; it had been ranked 10th on the 52nd list (and 1st on the June 2012, 41st list, after an upgrade).
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
is back on the TOP500 list with six
Microsoft Azure Microsoft Azure, or just Azure ( /ˈæʒər, ˈeɪʒər/ ''AZH-ər, AY-zhər'', UK also /ˈæzjʊər, ˈeɪzjʊər/ ''AZ-ure, AY-zure''), is the cloud computing platform developed by Microsoft. It has management, access and development of ...
instances (that use/are benchmarked with
Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed primarily of free and open-source software. Developed by the British company Canonical (company), Canonical and a community of contributors under a Meritocracy, meritocratic gover ...
, so all the supercomputers are still Linux-based), with CPUs and GPUs from same vendors, the fastest one currently 11th, and another older/slower previously made 10th. And Amazon with one AWS instance currently ranked 64th (it was previously ranked 40th). The number of Arm-based supercomputers is 6; currently all Arm-based supercomputers use the same Fujitsu CPU as in the number 2 system, with the next one previously ranked 13th, now 25th. Legend: * RankPosition within the TOP500 ranking. In the TOP500 list table, the computers are ordered first by their Rmax value. In the case of equal performances (Rmax value) for different computers, the order is by Rpeak. For sites that have the same computer, the order is by memory size and then alphabetically. * RmaxThe highest score measured using the
LINPACK benchmarks The LINPACK benchmarks are a measure of a system's floating-point computing power. Introduced by Jack Dongarra, they measure how fast a computer solves a dense ''n'' × ''n'' system of linear equations ''Ax'' = ''b'', which i ...
suite. This is the number that is used to rank the computers. Measured in quadrillions of 64-bit
floating point In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic on subsets of real numbers formed by a ''significand'' (a signed sequence of a fixed number of digits in some base) multiplied by an integer power of that base. Numbers of this form ...
operations per
second The second (symbol: s) is a unit of time derived from the division of the day first into 24 hours, then to 60 minutes, and finally to 60 seconds each (24 × 60 × 60 = 86400). The current and formal definition in the International System of U ...
, i.e., peta
FLOPS Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measu ...
. * RpeakThis is the theoretical peak performance of the system. Computed in petaFLOPS. * NameSome supercomputers are unique, at least on its location, and are thus named by their owner. * ModelThe computing platform as it is marketed. * ProcessorThe
instruction set In computer science, an instruction set architecture (ISA) is an abstract model that generally defines how software controls the CPU in a computer or a family of computers. A device or program that executes instructions described by that ISA, s ...
architecture or processor
microarchitecture In electronics, computer science and computer engineering, microarchitecture, also called computer organization and sometimes abbreviated as μarch or uarch, is the way a given instruction set architecture (ISA) is implemented in a particular ...
, alongside GPU and accelerators when available. * InterconnectThe
interconnect In telecommunications, interconnection is the physical linking of a carrier's network with equipment or facilities not belonging to that network. The term may refer to a connection between a carrier's facilities and the equipment belonging to its ...
between computing nodes.
InfiniBand InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also used ...
is most used (38%) by performance share, while
Gigabit Ethernet In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or 1 GigE) is the term applied to transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second. The most popular variant, 1000BASE-T, is defined by the IEEE 802.3ab standard. It came into use in ...
is most used (54%) by number of computers. * ManufacturerThe manufacturer of the platform and hardware. * SiteThe name of the facility operating the supercomputer. * CountryThe country in which the computer is located. * YearThe year of installation or last major update. * Operating systemThe operating system that the computer uses.


Top countries

Numbers below represent the number of computers in the TOP500 that are in each of the listed countries or territories. As of 2025, United States has the most supercomputers on the list, with 174 machines. The United States has the highest aggregate computational power at 6,696 Petaflops Rmax with Japan second (1,229 Pflop/s) and Germany third (1,201 Pflop/s).


Other rankings


Fastest supercomputer in TOP500 by country

(As of November 2023)


Systems ranked

* HPE Cray
El Capitan El Capitan (; ) is a vertical Rock formations in the United States, rock formation in Yosemite National Park, on the north side of Yosemite Valley, near its western end. The El Capitan Granite, granite monolith is about from base to summit alo ...
(
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Livermore, California, United States. Originally established in 1952, the laboratory now i ...
, November 2024Present) * HPE Cray
Frontier A frontier is a political and geographical term referring to areas near or beyond a boundary. Australia The term "frontier" was frequently used in colonial Australia in the meaning of country that borders the unknown or uncivilised, th ...
(
Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1943, the laboratory is sponsored by the United Sta ...
, June 2022November 2024) * Supercomputer Fugaku ( Riken Center for Computational Science , June 2020June 2022) * IBM
Summit A summit is a point on a surface that is higher in elevation than all points immediately adjacent to it. The topographic terms acme, apex, peak (mountain peak), and zenith are synonymous. The term (mountain top) is generally used only for ...
(
Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1943, the laboratory is sponsored by the United Sta ...
, June 2018June 2020) * NRCPC
Sunway TaihuLight The Sunway TaihuLight ( ''Shénwēi·tàihú zhī guāng'') is a Chinese supercomputer which, , is ranked 11th in the TOP500 list, with a LINPACK benchmark rating of 93 petaflops. The name is translated as ''divine power, the light of Taihu Lake ...
(National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi , June 2016November 2017) * NUDT
Tianhe-2 Tianhe-2 or TH-2 (, i.e. 'Milky Way 2') is a 33.86- petaflop supercomputer located in the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China. It was developed by a team of 1,300 scientists and engineers. It was the world's fastest supercomputer ...
A (National Supercomputing Center of Guangzhou , June 2013June 2016) * Cray
Titan Titan most often refers to: * Titan (moon), the largest moon of Saturn * Titans, a race of deities in Greek mythology Titan or Titans may also refer to: Arts and entertainment Fictional entities Fictional locations * Titan in fiction, fictiona ...
(
Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1943, the laboratory is sponsored by the United Sta ...
, November 2012June 2013) * IBM Sequoia Blue Gene/Q (
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Livermore, California, United States. Originally established in 1952, the laboratory now i ...
, June 2012November 2012) * Fujitsu K computer ( Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science , June 2011June 2012) * NUDT Tianhe-1A ( National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin , November 2010June 2011) * Cray
Jaguar The jaguar (''Panthera onca'') is a large felidae, cat species and the only extant taxon, living member of the genus ''Panthera'' that is native to the Americas. With a body length of up to and a weight of up to , it is the biggest cat spe ...
(
Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1943, the laboratory is sponsored by the United Sta ...
, November 2009November 2010) * IBM Roadrunner (
Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development Laboratory, laboratories of the United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, United States Department of Energy ...
, June 2008November 2009) * IBM
Blue Gene Blue Gene was an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with relatively low power consumption. The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue ...
/L (
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Livermore, California, United States. Originally established in 1952, the laboratory now i ...
, November 2004June 2008) * NEC Earth Simulator (Earth Simulator Center , June 2002November 2004) * IBM ASCI White (
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Livermore, California, United States. Originally established in 1952, the laboratory now i ...
, November 2000June 2002) * Intel ASCI Red (
Sandia National Laboratories Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), also known as Sandia, is one of three research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Headquartered in Kirtland Air Force B ...
, June 1997November 2000) * Hitachi CP-PACS (
University of Tsukuba is a List of national universities in Japan, national research university located in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, Ibaraki, Japan. The university has 28 college clusters and schools with around 16,500 students (as of 2014). The main Tsukuba ca ...
, November 1996June 1997) * Hitachi SR2201 (
University of Tokyo The University of Tokyo (, abbreviated as in Japanese and UTokyo in English) is a public research university in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Founded in 1877 as the nation's first modern university by the merger of several pre-westernisation era ins ...
, June 1996November 1996) * Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel ( National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan , November 1994June 1996) * Intel Paragon XP/S140 (
Sandia National Laboratories Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), also known as Sandia, is one of three research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Headquartered in Kirtland Air Force B ...
, June 1994November 1994) * Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel ( National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan , November 1993June 1994) * TMC CM-5 (
Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development Laboratory, laboratories of the United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, United States Department of Energy ...
, June 1993November 1993)


Additional statistics

By number of systems : Note: All operating systems of the TOP500 systems are
Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
-family based, but Linux above is generic Linux.
Sunway TaihuLight The Sunway TaihuLight ( ''Shénwēi·tàihú zhī guāng'') is a Chinese supercomputer which, , is ranked 11th in the TOP500 list, with a LINPACK benchmark rating of 93 petaflops. The name is translated as ''divine power, the light of Taihu Lake ...
is the system with the most CPU cores (10,649,600).
Tianhe-2 Tianhe-2 or TH-2 (, i.e. 'Milky Way 2') is a 33.86- petaflop supercomputer located in the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China. It was developed by a team of 1,300 scientists and engineers. It was the world's fastest supercomputer ...
has the most GPU/accelerator cores (4,554,752).
Aurora An aurora ( aurorae or auroras), also commonly known as the northern lights (aurora borealis) or southern lights (aurora australis), is a natural light display in Earth's sky, predominantly observed in high-latitude regions (around the Arc ...
is the system with the greatest power consumption with 38,698 kilowatts.


New developments in supercomputing

In November 2014, it was announced that the United States was developing two new supercomputers to exceed China's Tianhe-2 in its place as world's fastest supercomputer. The two computers, Sierra and
Summit A summit is a point on a surface that is higher in elevation than all points immediately adjacent to it. The topographic terms acme, apex, peak (mountain peak), and zenith are synonymous. The term (mountain top) is generally used only for ...
, will each exceed Tianhe-2's 55 peak petaflops. Summit, the more powerful of the two, will deliver 150–300 peak petaflops. On 10 April 2015, US government agencies banned selling chips, from Nvidia to supercomputing centers in China as "acting contrary to the
national security National security, or national defence (national defense in American English), is the security and Defence (military), defence of a sovereign state, including its Citizenship, citizens, economy, and institutions, which is regarded as a duty of ...
... interests of the United States"; and Intel Corporation from providing Xeon chips to China due to their use, according to the US, in researching nuclear weaponsresearch to which US
export control Export control is legislation that regulates the export of goods, software and technology. Some items could potentially be useful for purposes that are contrary to the interest of the exporting country. These items are considered to be ''controlled ...
law bans US companies from contributing"The Department of Commerce refused, saying it was concerned about nuclear research being done with the machine." On 29 July 2015, President Obama signed an executive order creating a National Strategic Computing Initiative calling for the accelerated development of an exascale (1000 petaflop) system and funding research into post-semiconductor computing. In June 2016, Japanese firm Fujitsu announced at the
International Supercomputing Conference The ISC High Performance, formerly known as the International Supercomputing Conference, is a yearly conference on supercomputing which has been held in Europe since 1986. It stands as the oldest supercomputing conference in the world. History ...
that its future exascale supercomputer will feature processors of its own design that implement the
ARMv8 ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of RISC instruction set architectures (ISAs) for computer processors. Arm Holdings develops the ISAs and lice ...
architecture. The Flagship2020 program, by Fujitsu for RIKEN plans to break the exaflops barrier by 2020 through the Fugaku supercomputer, (and "it looks like China and France have a chance to do so and that the United States is contentfor the moment at leastto wait until 2023 to break through the exaflops barrier.") These processors will also implement extensions to the ARMv8 architecture equivalent to HPC-ACE2 that Fujitsu is developing with Arm. In June 2016, Sunway TaihuLight became the No. 1 system with 93 petaflop/s (PFLOP/s) on the Linpack benchmark. In November 2016, Piz Daint was upgraded, moving it from 8th to 3rd, leaving the US with no systems under the TOP3 for the 2nd time. Inspur, based out of
Jinan Jinan is the capital of the province of Shandong in East China. With a population of 9.2 million, it is one of the largest cities in Shandong in terms of population. The area of present-day Jinan has played an important role in the history of ...
, China, is one of the largest HPC system manufacturers. , Inspur has become the third manufacturer to have manufactured a 64-way systema record that has previously been held by
IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...
and HP. The company has registered over $10B in revenue and has provided a number of systems to countries such as Sudan, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Inspur was also a major technology partner behind both the
Tianhe-2 Tianhe-2 or TH-2 (, i.e. 'Milky Way 2') is a 33.86- petaflop supercomputer located in the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China. It was developed by a team of 1,300 scientists and engineers. It was the world's fastest supercomputer ...
and Taihu supercomputers, occupying the top 2 positions of the TOP500 list up until November 2017. Inspur and Supermicro released a few platforms aimed at HPC using GPU such as SR-AI and AGX-2 in May 2017. In June 2018, Summit, an IBM-built system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, US, took the No. 1 spot with a performance of 122.3 petaflop/s (PFLOP/s), and Sierra, a very similar system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, CA, US took #3. These systems also took the first two spots on the HPCG benchmark. Due to Summit and Sierra, the US took back the lead as consumer of HPC performance with 38.2% of the overall installed performance while China was second with 29.1% of the overall installed performance. For the first time ever, the leading HPC manufacturer was not a US company. Lenovo took the lead with 23.8% of systems installed. It is followed by HPE with 15.8%, Inspur with 13.6%, Cray with 11.2%, and Sugon with 11%. On 18 March 2019, the
United States Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and energy production, the research and development of nuclear power, the military's nuclear w ...
and
Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...
announced the first exaFLOP supercomputer would be operational at
Argonne National Laboratory Argonne National Laboratory is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Lemont, Illinois, Lemont, Illinois, United States. Founded in 1946, the laboratory is owned by the United Sta ...
by the end of 2021. The computer, named
Aurora An aurora ( aurorae or auroras), also commonly known as the northern lights (aurora borealis) or southern lights (aurora australis), is a natural light display in Earth's sky, predominantly observed in high-latitude regions (around the Arc ...
, was delivered to Argonne by Intel and
Cray Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed ...
. On 7 May 2019, The U.S. Department of Energy announced a contract with
Cray Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed ...
to build the "Frontier" supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Frontier is anticipated to be operational in 2021 and, with a performance of greater than 1.5 exaflops, should then be the world's most powerful computer. Since June 2019, all TOP500 systems deliver a petaflop or more on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, with the entry level to the list now at 1.022 petaflops. In May 2022, the Frontier supercomputer broke the exascale barrier, completing more than a
quintillion Depending on context (e.g. language, culture, region), some large numbers have names that allow for describing large quantities in a textual form; not mathematical. For very large values, the text is generally shorter than a decimal numeric repres ...
64-bit floating point arithmetic calculations per second. Frontier clocked in at approximately 1.1 exaflops, beating out the previous record-holder, Fugaku.


Large machines not on the list

Some major systems are not on the list. A prominent example is the NCSA's Blue Waters which publicly announced the decision not to participate in the list because they do not feel it accurately indicates the ability of any system to do useful work. Other organizations decide not to list systems for security and/or commercial competitiveness reasons. One such example is the National Supercomputing Center at Qingdao's OceanLight supercomputer, completed in March 2021, which was submitted for, and won, the Gordon Bell Prize. The computer is an exaflop computer, but was not submitted to the TOP500 list; the first exaflop machine submitted to the TOP500 list was Frontier. Analysts suspected that the reason the NSCQ did not submit what would otherwise have been the world's first exascale supercomputer was to avoid inflaming political sentiments and fears within the United States, in the context of the United States – China trade war. Additional purpose-built machines that are not capable or do not run the benchmark were not included, such as RIKEN MDGRAPE-3 and MDGRAPE-4. A Google Tensor Processing Unit v4 pod is capable of 1.1 exaflops of peak performance, while TPU v5p claims over 4 exaflops in Bfloat16 floating-point format, however these units are highly specialized to run
machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...
workloads and the TOP500 measures a specific benchmark algorithm using a specific numeric precision. Tesla Dojo's primary unnamed cluster using 5,760
Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...
A100
graphics processing units A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal co ...
(GPUs) was touted by
Andrej Karpathy Andrej Karpathy (born 23 October 1986) is a Slovak-Canadian computer scientist who served as the director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla. He co-founded and formerly worked at OpenAI, where he specialized in deep lear ...
in 2021 at the fourth International Joint Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CCVPR 2021) to be "roughly the number five supercomputer in the world" at approximately 81.6
petaflops Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measu ...
, based on scaling the performance of the Nvidia Selene supercomputer, which uses similar components. In March 2024, Meta AI disclosed the operation of two datacenters with 24,576 H100 GPUs, which is almost 2x as on the Microsoft Azure Eagle (#3 as of September 2024), which could have made them occupy 3rd and 4th places in TOP500, but neither have been benchmarked. During company's Q3 2024
earnings call An earnings call is a teleconference or webcast in which a public company discusses its financial results for a reporting period, often providing earnings guidance for future performance. The term stems from earnings per share (EPS), calculated ...
in October, M. Zuckerberg disclosed usage of a cluster with over 100,000 H100s. '' xAI'' Memphis Supercluster (also known as " Colossus") allegedly features 100,000 of the same H100 GPUs, which could have put it in the first place, but it is reportedly not in full operation due to power shortages.


Computers and architectures that have dropped off the list

IBM Roadrunner is no longer on the list (nor is any other using the Cell coprocessor, or PowerXCell). Although
Itanium Itanium (; ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit computing, 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly dev ...
-based systems reached second rank in 2004, none now remain. Similarly (non-
SIMD Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) is a type of parallel computer, parallel processing in Flynn's taxonomy. SIMD describes computers with multiple processing elements that perform the same operation on multiple data points simultaneousl ...
-style)
vector processor In computing, a vector processor or array processor is a central processing unit (CPU) that implements an instruction set where its instructions are designed to operate efficiently and effectively on large one-dimensional arrays of data called ...
s (NEC-based such as the Earth simulator that was fastest in 2002) have also fallen off the list. Also the Sun Starfire computers that occupied many spots in the past now no longer appear. The last non-Linux computers on the list the two AIX ones running on POWER7 (in July 2017 ranked 494th and 495th, originally 86th and 85th), dropped off the list in November 2017.


Notes

* The first edition of TOP500 to feature only 64-bit supercomputers was the 59th edition of TOP500, which was published in June 2022. * As of June 2022, TOP500 features only 64-bit supercomputers. * The world’s most powerful supercomputers are from the United States and Japan.


See also

*
Computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...
*
Computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, hardware and softw ...
*
Graph500 The Graph500 is a rating of supercomputer systems, focused on data-intensive loads. The project was announced on International Supercomputing Conference in June 2010. The first list was published at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in Nov ...
*
Green500 The Green500 is a biannual ranking of supercomputers, from the TOP500 list of supercomputers, in terms of energy efficiency. The list measures performance per watt using the TOP500 measure of high performance LINPACK benchmarks at double-preci ...
* HPC Challenge Benchmark *
Instructions per second Instructions per second (IPS) is a measure of a computer's Central processing unit, processor speed. For complex instruction set computers (CISCs), different Machine code, instructions take different amounts of time, so the value measured depen ...
*
LINPACK benchmarks The LINPACK benchmarks are a measure of a system's floating-point computing power. Introduced by Jack Dongarra, they measure how fast a computer solves a dense ''n'' × ''n'' system of linear equations ''Ax'' = ''b'', which i ...
* List of fastest computers


References


External links

*
LINPACK benchmarks
at TOP500 {{authority control Supercomputer benchmarks Supercomputer sites Top lists