'Who's Who' in High Performance Computing: TOP500 Celebrates 10th Anniversary

摘要

Now in its 10th year, the TOP500 list of supercomputers serves as a "Who's Who" in the field of high performance computing (HPC). The TOP500 list was started in 1993, compiling and publishing twice a year a list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. But it is more than just a ranking system and serves as an important source of information for analyzing trends in HPC. This article analyzes some major trends in HPC based on the quantitative data gathered over the years in the TOP500 project (For complete access to all data and further analysis, visit www.top500.org). The list of manufacturers active in this market segment has changed continuously and quite dramatically during the 10-year history of this project. And while the architectures of the systems in the list also have seen constant change, it turns out that the overall increase in the performance levels recorded is rather smooth and predictable. The most important single factor for this growth is the increase of processor performance described by Moore's Law. However, the TOP500 list clearly illustrates that HPC performance has actually outpaced Moore's Law, due to the increasing number of processors in HPC systems.