Home Lists

June 1998

The 11th TOP500 list was published at the Supercomputer 1998 in Mannheim (June 1998 ).

The list continues to change rapidly in all ranges of performance. The number one computer is again the Intel ASCI Red system at Sandia National Laboratory with achieved performance of over 1.3 TFlop/s using 9152 Pentium Pro processors. The new machine at the number 2 position is a SGI T3E with 1080 processors installed by the US Government. This system achieved 891 GFlop/s and fell only a bit short of being the second Teraflop system installed. Also new are two NEC SX4 systems with 128 processor each demonstrating the potential of high-end vector systems.

In November 1997 an achieved Linpack performance of 200 GFlop/s would have been enough to gain one of the top 10 positions. This time it only guarantees a spot in the top 20. The number of systems that exceed 100 GFlop/s Linpack performance doubled within one year from 21 to 43.

The last entry of the TOP500 list shows now a performance rate of 13.39 GFlop/s compared to 9.5 GFlop/s in November 1997. The total accumulated performance of all 500 systems grew from 16.7 TFlop/s in November 1997 to 22.6 TFlop/s in June 1998.

SGI is again leading the list with 200 systems down from 216. Sun Microsystems is still growing and in second position with 111 systems up from 85, ahead of IBM who remained constant at 75 systems.

With respect to the accumulated performance of all systems on the list, SGI is also the clear leader with 11.7 TFlop/s, with Sun and IBM tied at second place with 2.1 TFlop/s each.

The number of industrial and commercial sites listed in the TOP500 rose strongly up to 178 systems. This was mainly due to the strong rise of Sun that shows an exceptional high percentage of industrial customers in the top500 (96 systems out of 111).

The most successful computer models in the new TOP500 list are Sun's HPC 10000 systems with 111 installations; SGI's Origin 2000 with 91 installations; and IBM's SP2 System with 75 installations.

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