Top500 Supercomputers: Who Gets The Most Out Of Peak Performance?
The Next Platform, Monday, November 13,2023
The most exciting thing about the Top500 rankings of supercomputers that come out each June and November is not who is on the top of the list. That's fun and interesting, of course, but the real thing about the Top500 is the architectural lessons it gives us when we see new systems emerge on the Top500 and we get to see how choices of compute, memory, interconnect, storage, and budget all play out at a system level and across nations and industries.
We would normally walk through the top ten machines on the list and then delve into the statistics embodied in the Top500. This time around, we have assembled a more usable feeds and speeds of salient characteristics of the top thirty machines on the list, which we feel is representative of the upper echelon of HPC supercomputing right now.
But first, before we do that, it is appropriate to just review the performance development of the top and bottom systems that are tested using the High Performance LINPACK benchmark and the total capacity represented in the entire list between for the past thirty years that the Top500 rankings have been compiled.