November 1999
Contents
The 14th TOP500 list was published at the SC99 Conference in Portalnd, OR (13-19, November 1999).
A surprise outcome for this edition of the report is the fact that the duo SGI/Cray is no longer number one in the total number of systems installed. This is the first time this has happened. IBM has taken this spot with 141 systems ahead of SGI/Cray with 133 systems and Sun with 113. With respect to the installed performance SGI/Cray is still in the lead with 19.5 TFlop/s ahead of IBM with 13.7 TFlop/s and Sun with 4.8 TFlop/s.
The influence of the US Department of Energy's ASCI program is clearly visible as the first three spots on the list are taken by the three ASCI systems. The upgraded Intel ASCI Red system at Sandia National Laboratory with achieved performance of 2.38 TFlop/s using 9632 Pentium II processors remains the number one computer. The ASCI Blue-Pacific system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is second with 2.14 TFlop/s and the ASCI Blue Mountain system at Los Alamos National Laboratory is number three with 1.6 TFlop/s. These are the only systems currently exceeding the 1 TFlop/s level on the Linpack benchmark. However the TOP500 already contains 8 systems exceeding 1 TFlop/s theoretical peak performance.
The list continues to change rapidly in all ranges of performance. 101 systems exceed the mark of 100 GFlop/s this time. The last entry of the TOP500 list shows now a performance rate of 31.09 GFlop/s compared to 17.12 GFlop/s in November 1998. 222 systems fell of the list in the last half-year due to this increase in the entry-level performance. The average growth rate per year of this entry-level performance is a factor of 2. This observed performance growth is well above the growth predicted by Moore's Law, which states a factor of 2 in 18 month (1.6 per year). The total accumulated performance of all 500 systems grew from 29.6 TFlop/s in November 1998 to 50.97 TFlop/s in June 1999. The average growth rate for the accumulated performance is 1.8 per year.
TOP 10 Sites for November 1999
For more information about the sites and systems in the list, click on the links or view the complete list.
| Rank | Site | Computer |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sandia National Laboratories United States | ASCI Red Intel |
| 2 | Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory United States | ASCI Blue-Pacific SST, IBM SP 604e IBM |
| 3 | Los Alamos National Laboratory United States | ASCI Blue Mountain SGI |
| 4 | Government United States | T3E1200 Cray Inc. |
| 5 | University of Tokyo Japan | SR8000/128 Hitachi |
| 6 | Government United States | T3E900 Cray Inc. |
| 7 | Los Alamos National Laboratory/ACL United States | ORIGIN 2000 250 MHz SGI |
| 8 | Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO) United States | T3E900 Cray Inc. |
| 9 | Deutscher Wetterdienst Germany | T3E1200 Cray Inc. |
| 10 | UCSD/San Diego Supercomputer Center United States | SP Power3 222 MHz IBM |