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June 2006

The 27th TOP500 List was introduced during the International Supercomputer Conference (ISC2006) in Dresden, Germany.

The No. 1 position was again claimed by the BlueGene/L System, a joint development of IBM and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. BlueGene/L also occupied the No. 1 position on the last three TOP500 lists. It has reached a Linpack benchmark performance of 280.6 TFlop/s (“teraflops” or trillions of calculations per second) and still remains the only system ever to exceed the level of 100 TFlop/s. This system is expected to remain the No. 1 Supercomputer in the world for the next few editions of the TOP500 list.

Even as processor frequencies seem to stall the performance improvements of full systems seen at the very high end of scientific computing shows no sign of slowing down. This time the last 158 systems on the list in June 2005 are too small to be included any longer, which represents a lower than average turn-over rate after two record breaking rates in the last lists. However, the growth of average performance remains stable and ahead of Moore’s Law.

Highlights from the Top 10:

• Unchallenged leader remains the DOE's IBM BlueGene/L system, installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). With 280.6 TFlop/s on the Linpack benchmark it is still the only system ever to exceed the 100 TFlop/s mark.
• Changes in the TOP10 showed three interesting newcomers, all outside the U.S., and one system upgrade.
• The No. 3 ASC Purple system at LLNL, also built by IBM but based on the pSeries 575 servers, was slightly upgraded and reaches now 75.76 TFlop/s.
• The largest system in Europe is the new No. 5 at the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA). It is an Itanium-based NovaScale 5160 system build by the French company Bull with 8704 processors and a Quadrics interconnect.
• No. 7 is now occupied by the largest system in Japan, a cluster integrated by NEC based on Sun Fire x64 with Opteron processors and an InfiniBand interconnect, installed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
• For the first time in the history of the TOP500 project (since 1993), the top Japanese system is not manufactured in Japan itself.
• The German Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) got to No. 8 with its new BlueGene system, which is now the second largest system in Europe. It is the largest BlueGene system outside the U.S. and the third largest in general.
• The Earth Simulator, built by NEC, which held the No. 1 spot for five lists, has now slipped to No. 10 and will almost certainly be displaced from the TOP10 by November.

For more information about the sites and systems in the list, click on the links or view the complete list.