The most commonly known ranking of supercomputer installations around the world is the TOP500 list ³. It uses the equally famous LINPACK Benchmark ⁴ as a single figure of merit to rank 500 of the worlds most powerful supercomputers. The often raised issue of the relation between TOP500 and HPCC can simply be addressed by recognizing all the positive aspects of the former. In particular, the longevity of TOP500 gives an unprecedented view of the high-end arena across the turbulent times of Moore's law ⁵ rule and the process of emerging of today's prevalent computing paradigms. The predictive power of TOP500 will have a lasting influence in the future as it did in the past. While building on the legacy information, HPCC extends the context of the HPCS goals and can serve as a valuable tool for performance analysis. Table 1 shows an example of how the data from the HPCC database can augment the TOP500 results.

The first reference implementation of the code was released to the public in 2003. The first optimized submission came in April 2004 from Cray using their recent X1 installation at Oak Ridge National Lab. Every since then Cray has championed the list of optimized submissions. By the time of the first HPCC birds-of-feather at the 2004 Supercomputing conference in Pittsburgh, the public database of results already featured major supercomputer makers - a sign that vendors noticed the benchmark. At the same time, a bit behind the scenes, the code was also tried by government and private institutions for procurement and marketing purposes. The highlight of 2005 was the announcement of a contest: the HPCC Awards. The two complementary categories of the competition emphasized performance and productivity - the very goals of the sponsoring HPCS program. The performance-emphasizing Class 1 award drew attention to the biggest players in the supercomputing industry, which resulted in populating the HPCC database with most of the top-10 entries of TOP500 (some of which even exceeding performance reported in the TOP500 - a tribute to HPCC's continuous results' update policy). The contestants competed to achieve highest raw performance in one of the four tests: HPL, STREAM, RANDA, and FFT. The Class 2 award, by solely focusing on productivity, introduced subjectivity factor to the judging but also to the submitter criteria of what is appropriate for the contest. As a result, a wide range of solutions were submitted spanning various programming languages (interpreted and compiled) and paradigms (with explicit and implicit parallelism). It featured openly available as well as proprietary technologies, some of which were arguably confined to niche markets and some that are widely used. The financial incentives for entering turned out to be all that was needed, as the HPCC seemed to have enjoyed enough recognition among the high-end community. Nevertheless, HPCwire kindly provided both press coverage as well as cash rewards for four winning contestants of Class 1 and the winner of Class 2. At the HPCC's second birds-of-feather session during the SC|05 conference in Seattle, the former class was dominated by IBM's BlueGene/L from Lawrence Livermore National Lab while the latter was split among MTA pragma-decorated C and UPC codes from Cray and IBM, respectively.