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June 1997

The 9th TOP500 list was published at the Supercomputer 1997 in Mannheim (June 1997 ).

The new number one computer is the Intel ASCI Red system at Sandia National Laboratory with achieved performance of over 1 TFlop/s using 7264 Pentium P6 processors. Other interesting entries are the IBM 'Deep Blue' computer that was used in the recent Chess Championship at number 260 and the Network of Workstations (NOW) at Berkeley at number 345.

Overall the complete list changed quite a bit. Seven new systems appeared in the top 10 positions, 6 of them are SGI/Cray T3E systems. Of the top 10, four are located in the US, three in Japan, and three in Europe. The last entry of the TOP500 list shows a performance rate of 7.68 GFlop/s compared to 4.62 GFlop/s in November. The total accumulated performance of all 500 systems grew also quiet substantial from 8 TFlop/s in November 1996 to 13 TFlop/s in June 1997

The combined company SGI/Cray is again leading the list with 204 systems. IBM is in a second place with 70 systems (compared to 126 systems last November), followed by HP/Convex with 67 systems, and Sun Microsystems with 60 systems. This was the first time that Sun appears in the TOP500 list.

With respect to the accumulated Rmax performance, SGI/Cray is also the clear leader with 5.5 TFlop/s, with Intel in second place with 1.6 Tflop/s.

The most successful computer models in the new TOP500 list are:

• SGI's Origins 2000 with 81 installations,
• IBM's SP2 System with 70 installations,
• and HP/Convex S/X-Class Systems with 65 installations.

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