ACADEMIA

By Steve Fisher, Editor -- The 19th Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers was introduced today at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC2002) in Heidelberg, Germany. The top spot on the prestigious list came as no surprise to industry watchers, Japan’s 35+ Tflop Earth Simulator designed by NEC. Earth Simulator brutalized the competition with a record lead of a factor of nearly five over the number two spot, Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s IBM SP-powered ASCI White. In fact, Earth Simulator equals the sum of the Linpack performance of the next 12 systems. "The most significant fact about the new TOP500 list is of course the new number one, the Earth Simulator, with a Linpack R_max rating of almost five times that of number two," said NERSC Director Horst Simon. "One of the remarkable facts about the TOP500 list is that one can easily go back into the database and check with a simple query that there was never such a large gap between the number 1 and number 2 machine worldwide during the last decade. The TOP500 list is proving again its value to accurately measure trends in the dynamic field of HPC". Only on the June 1999 TOP500 list did the sum of all 500 systems on the list exceed the performance level of the ES. Before this the aggregate performance of all 500 system was smaller than 30TF/s. Spots three through five on the list were as follows: the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center’s TeraScale System consisting of HP AlphaServers; France’s CEA (Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique) system of AlphaServers named Tera; and NERSC’s SP Power 3 system. There were three systems in addition to the Earth Simulator which were new to the top ten: CEA’s entry at #4; the 2.3 TF/s IBM Power4 system connected with the new IBM SP switch installed at the Oak Ridge National Lab at #8; and a similar 2 TF/s IBM system currently tested at Poughkeepsie for shipment to the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) which came in at #10. As far as vendors are concerned, 5 of the TOP10 systems are from IBM, 3 from HP, and one from NEC, and Intel (ASCI Red). As to nationality, 8 of the TOP10 systems are installed in the US, one in Japan and one in France 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. For additional information and the complete Top500 list visit www.top500.org.