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November 2005

The 26th TOP500 List was introduced during the Supercomputing Conference (SC|05) in Seattle, WA.

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 two TOP500 lists. However, the system was doubled in size during the last six months and reached a new record Linpack benchmark performance of 280.6 TFlop/s ("teraflops" or trillions of calculations per second). No other system has yet exceeded the level of 100 TFlop/s and this system is expected to remain the No. 1 Supercomputer in the world for the next few editions of the TOP500 list.

The pace of innovation and performance improvements seen at the very high end of scientific computing shows no sign of slowing down. This time, four of the TOP10 systems on the June 2005 TOP500 list were displaced by newly installed systems, and the last 221 systems on the list from June 2005 are now too small to be included.

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.

BOF Session at SC|05

• Top10 and Awards (Horst Simon)
• Highlights of the 26th Top500 List (Erich Strohmaier)
• Benchmarking Activities
  • Benchmarking Initiatives (Erich Strohmaier)
  • Status of HPC Challenge Benchmark (Jack Dongarra)
  • Top500 Auto (Christian Tanasescu)
• 27th Top500 List at ISC2006 in Dresden (Hans Meuer)
• Q&A (all)

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