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June 2002

The 19th TOP500 list was introduced at the ISC2002 Conference in Heidelberg, June 19-22, 2002.

The recently installed Earth Simulator supercomputer at the Earth Simulator Center in Yokohama, Japan, is - as expected - the clear new number 1. Its performance of 35.86 Tflop/s (trillions of calculations per second) running the Linpack benchmark is almost five times higher than the performance of the now #2 IBM ASCI White system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (7.2 Tflop/s). This powerful leapfrogging to the top by a system so much faster than the previous top system is unparalleled in the history of the TOP500.

The recently installed Earth Simulator supercomputer at the Earth Simulator Center in Yokohama, Japan, is - as expected - the clear new number 1. Its performance of 35.86 Tflop/s (trillions of calculations per second) running the Linpack benchmark is almost five times higher than the performance of the now #2 IBM ASCI White system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (7.2 Tflop/s). This powerful leapfrogging to the top by a system so much faster than the previous top system is unparalleled in the history of the TOP500.

The new TOP500 list, as well as the former lists, can be found on the Web at http://www.top500.org/ . Hypothetically one would need to combine the next 12 systems on the TOP500 to match the performance of the Earth Simulator system built by NEC. Its architecture is largely based on the NEC SX-6 line of vector-systems, which are sold in the USA by Cray Inc. The size of the Earth Simulator can be illustrated by the fact that before the June 1999 TOP500 list, the sum of all 500 systems on this biannual list was smaller than 30 Tflop/s and thus did not exceed the performance level of the Earth Simulator.

The latest edition of the TOP500 finds Hewlett-Packard as the leader in the field, with 168 installed systems - only slightly ahead of IBM with 164 systems.

The merger of Hewlett-Packard and Compaq is one of the main reasons for HP being ahead of IBM. The number of installed systems has actually changed only little compared to six months ago, if HP and Compaq are considered together.

In terms of total performance of all the installed systems IBM is still the clear leader with 33.3percent, ahead of HP with 22.2 percent and NEC with 19 percent. No other company was able to gain more than 8 percent in either of these two categories. The list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee. The list was released today at the ISC2002 Conference in Heidelberg, Germany. The list exhibits unbroken growth at all ranges of performance.

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