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June 2003

The 21st TOP500 List was introduced during the International Supercomputer Conference (ISC2003) in Heidelberg, June 24-27, 2003.

The Earth Simulator supercomputer built by NEC and installed last year at the Earth Simulator Center in Yokohama, Japan, with its Linpack benchmark performance of 35.86 Tflop/s ("teraflops" or trillions of calculations per second), retains the number one position. The number 2 position is held by the re-measured ASCI Q system at Los Alamos National Laboratory. With 13.88 Tflop/s, it is the second system ever to exceed the 10 Tflop/s mark. ASCI Q was built by Hewlett-Packard and is based on the AlphaServer SC computer system.

The number of systems in the TOP500 list using Intel processors grew in the last six months from 56 to 119. This is a major shift in this marketplace. With this increase, the Intel processor family joins IBM's Power architecture and Hewlett-Packard's PA- RISC chips as one of the dominant processors used in HPC systems.

At position 5, the upgraded IBM SP system with 6,656 processors at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recorded a new IBM Linpack performance record of 7.3 Tflop/s. A new Linpack implementation was responsible for this result, which even exceeds the old measurement of the larger sister system, ASCI White at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (at position 4), which has 8,192 processors. Both systems have otherwise identical architectures. With this new Linpack implementation, ASCI White could also achieve a better result, but the system was unavailable for Linpack testing due to its large workload.

Therefore, the Intel Xeon-based MCR cluster at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory outranked ASCI White and achieved the highest position ever for any cluster (position 3). It uses a Quadrics interconnect and was manufactured by Linux Networx.

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