Overview

TOP500 is a list of 500 supercomputer sites ranked according to Linpack benchmark. During the summer of 2001, I worked on Hewlett Packard's code for the Linpack benchmark which lead to a 10% performance improvement. Number of systems that Hewlett Packard has on the list increased from 41 in June 2001 to 153 in November 2001. See the statistics below. Besides the increased number of systems, an interesting observation is that IBM needs almost five times as much processors to deliver less than three times of the accumulated Linpack performance.

Information about the improvements made to the Hewlett Packard's Linpack benchmark code were presented at the HiPer'01 conference in Bremen, Germany organized by Hewlett-Packard's HPC European User Group. The following conference materials are available on-line:

TOP500 Statistics

Manufacturers in June 2001 list:
Count Share Rmax [GF/s] Rpeak [GF/s] Processors
IBM 201 40.2 % 46260.07 71693 62781
Sun 81 16.2 % 9333.08 13162 16466
SGI 63 12.6 % 11132.96 16612 25926
Cray Inc. 45 9 % 14210.77 21189 22914
Hewlett-Packard 41 8.2 % 3998.30 7527 3572
NEC 18 3.6 % 3951.60 4168 754
Hitachi 16 3.2 % 8540.80 10460 3948
Fujitsu 15 3 % 4599.40 5020 957
Compaq 10 2 % 2357.91 3289 2432
Self-made 8 1.6 % 1848.80 3687 4163
HPTi 1 0.2 % 196.00 368 276
Intel 1 0.2 % 2379.00 3207 9632
Total 500 100 % 108808.69 160382 153821

Manufacturers in November 2001 list:
Count Share Rmax [GF/s] Rpeak [GF/s] Processors
IBM 160 32 % 50867.91 79074 63164
Hewlett-Packard 153 30.6 % 19867.90 29325 13432
SGI 40 8 % 10514.00 15400 22876
Cray Inc. 39 7.8 % 14083.17 21015 22378
Sun 30 6 % 4963.83 7417 9276
Fujitsu 19 3.8 % 5805.30 6624 1372
Compaq 16 3.2 % 10343.80 14649 8201
NEC 16 3.2 % 4380.40 4906 1708
Hitachi 14 2.8 % 8092.40 9750 1892
Self-made 6 1.2 % 2158.90 3715 3695
Dell 4 0.8 % 710.00 1599 1420
HPTi 1 0.2 % 442.70 840 580
Hitachi/Tsukuba 1 0.2 % 368.20 614 2048
Intel 1 0.2 % 2379.00 3207 9632
Total 500 100 % 134977.51 198135 161674