TOP500

History

In the early 1990s, a new definition of supercomputer was needed to produce meaningful statistics. After experimenting with metrics based on processor count in 1992, the idea arose at the University of Mannheim to use a detailed listing of installed systems as the basis. In early 1993, Jack Dongarra was persuaded to join the project with his LINPACK benchmarks. A first test version was produced in May 1993, partly based on data available on the Internet, including the following sources:

"List of the World's Most Powerful Computing Sites" maintained by Gunter Ahrendt

David Kahaner, the director of the Asian Technology Information Program (ATIP); published a report in 1992, titled "Kahaner Report on Supercomputer in Japan" which had an immense amount of data.

The information from those sources was used for the first two lists. Since June 1993, the TOP500 is produced semiannually based on site and vendor submissions only. Since 1993, performance of the No. 1 ranked position has grown steadily in accordance with Moore's law, doubling roughly every 14 months. In June 2018, Summit was fastest with an Rpeak of 187.6593 PFLOPS. For comparison, this is over 1,432,513 times faster than the Connection Machine CM-5/1024 (1,024 cores), which was the fastest system in November 1993 (twenty-five years prior) with an Rpeak of 131.0 GFLOPS.

In 2019, for the first time, all 500 systems deliver a petaflop [sic] or more on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, with the entry level to the list now at 1.022 petaflops." However, for a different benchmark "Summit and Sierra remain the only two systems to exceed a petaflop [sic] on the HPCG benchmark, delivering 2.9 petaflops and 1.8 petaflops, respectively. The average HPCG result on the current list is 213.3 teraflops, a marginal increase from 211.2 six months ago.

In June 2022, the top 4 systems of Graph500 used both AMD CPUs and AMD accelerators. After an upgrade, for the 56th TOP500 in November 2020, Fugaku grew its HPL performance to 442 petaflops, a modest increase from the 416 petaflops the system achieved when it debuted in June 2020. More significantly, the ARMv8.2 based Fugaku increased its performance on the new mixed precision HPC-AI benchmark to 2.0 exaflops, besting its 1.4 exaflops mark recorded six months ago. These represent the first benchmark measurements above one exaflop for any precision on any type of hardware.

Architecture and operating systems

While Intel, or at least the x86-64 CPU architecture has previously dominated the supercomputer list, by now AMD has more systems using that same architecture on top10, including 1st and 2nd place. And Microsoft Azure has 8 systems on top100, thereof only two with Intel CPUs, including though its most performant by far in 4th place (previously 3rd place). AMDs CPUs are usually coupled with AMD's GPU accelerators, while Intel's CPUs have historically been very often coupled with NVidia's GPU, though current Intel's third place (previously 2nd place) system notably uses Intel Data Center GPU Max. Arm-based system are also notable on the list in 4th, 7th (Fugaku, previously nr. 1) and 8th place and in total at least 23 not just from Fujitsu that introduced Arm-based the top spot; Nvidia has others with their "Superchip" CPU, not just GPUs.

As of June 2022, all supercomputers on TOP500 are 64-bit supercomputers, mostly based on CPUs with the x86-64 instruction set architecture, 384 of which are Intel EMT64-based and 101 of which are AMD AMD64-based, with the latter including the top eight supercomputers. 15 other supercomputers are all based on RISC architectures, including six based on ARM64 and seven based on the Power ISA used by IBM Power microprocessors.

In recent years, heterogeneous computing has dominated the TOP500, mostly using Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs) or Intel's x86-based Xeon Phi as coprocessors. This is because of better performance per watt ratios and higher absolute performance. AMD GPUs have taken the top 1 and displaced Nvidia in top 10 part of the list. The recent exceptions include the aforementioned Fugaku, Sunway TaihuLight, and K computer. Tianhe-2A is also an interesting exception, as US sanctions prevented use of Xeon Phi; instead, it was upgraded to use the Chinese-designed Matrix-2000 accelerators.

Two computers which first appeared on the list in 2018 were based on architectures new to the TOP500. One was a new x86-64 microarchitecture from Chinese manufacturer Sugon, using Hygon Dhyana CPUs (these resulted from a collaboration with AMD, and are a minor variant of Zen-based AMD EPYC) and was ranked 38th, now 117th, and the other was the first ARM-based computer on the list – using Cavium ThunderX2 CPUs. Before the ascendancy of 32-bit x86 and later 64-bit x86-64 in the early 2000s, a variety of RISC processor families made up most TOP500 supercomputers, including SPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC, and Alpha.

TOP500

As of June 2026, the number one supercomputer is LineShine, the leader on Green500 is KAIROS, a Bull Sequana XH3000 system using the Nvidia Grace Hopper GH200 Superchip. EuroHPC's Jupiter became Europe's first system to reach the exascale milestone.

Microsoft is back on the TOP500 list with six Microsoft Azure instances (that use/are benchmarked with Ubuntu, so all the supercomputers are still Linux-based), with CPUs and GPUs from same vendors, the fastest one currently 7th.

Top countries

Numbers below represent the number of computers in the TOP500 that are in each of the listed countries or territories. As of 2026, United States has the most supercomputers on the list, with 161 machines. The United States has the highest aggregate computational power at 7,031 Petaflops Rmax with China second (2,377 Pflop/s) and Japan third (1,518 Pflop/s).

Other rankings

Fastest supercomputer in TOP500 by country

(As of June 2026)

Systems ranked No. 1

Shenzhen Cloud Computing Center LineShine (National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen (NSCS) China, June 2026 – Present)

HPE Cray El Capitan (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory United States, November 2024 – June 2026)

HPE Cray Frontier (Oak Ridge National Laboratory United States, June 2022 – November 2024)

Supercomputer Fugaku (Riken Center for Computational Science Japan, June 2020 – June 2022)

IBM Summit (Oak Ridge National Laboratory United States, June 2018 – June 2020)

NRCPC Sunway TaihuLight (National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi China, June 2016 – November 2017)

NUDT Tianhe-2A (National Supercomputing Center of Guangzhou China, June 2013 – June 2016)

Cray Titan (Oak Ridge National Laboratory United States, November 2012 – June 2013)

IBM Sequoia Blue Gene/Q (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory United States, June 2012 – November 2012)

Fujitsu K computer (Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science Japan, June 2011 – June 2012)

NUDT Tianhe-1A (National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin China, November 2010 – June 2011)

Cray Jaguar (Oak Ridge National Laboratory United States, November 2009 – November 2010)

IBM Roadrunner (Los Alamos National Laboratory United States, June 2008 – November 2009)

Additional statistics

By number of systems as of June 2026:

Note: All operating systems of the TOP500 systems are Linux-family based, but Linux above is generic Linux.

The oldest system is currently the Sunway TaihuLight. It initially appeared on the 47th list in June 2016 with a Rmax of 93.0 petaFLOPS ranked as no. 1. This system is currently on the 27th place.

LineShine is the system with the most CPU cores (13,789,440). El Capitan has the most GPU/accelerator cores (10,260,000). LineShine is the system with the greatest power consumption with 42,220 kilowatts.

New developments in supercomputing

In November 2014, it was announced that the United States was developing two new supercomputers to exceed China's Tianhe-2 in its place as world's fastest supercomputer. The two computers, Sierra and Summit, will each exceed Tianhe-2's 55 petaflops peak. Summit, the more powerful of the two, will deliver 150–300 petaflops peak. On 10 April 2015, US government agencies banned selling chips, from Nvidia to supercomputing centers in China as "acting contrary to the national security ... interests of the United States"; and Intel Corporation from providing Xeon chips to China due to their use, according to the US, in researching nuclear weapons – research to which US export control law bans US companies from contributing – "The Department of Commerce refused, saying it was concerned about nuclear research being done with the machine."

On 29 July 2015, President Obama signed an executive order creating a National Strategic Computing Initiative calling for the accelerated development of an exascale (1000 petaflops) system and funding research into post-semiconductor computing.

In June 2016, Japanese firm Fujitsu announced at the International Supercomputing Conference that its future exascale supercomputer will feature processors of its own design that implement the ARMv8 architecture. The Flagship2020 program, by Fujitsu for RIKEN plans to break the exaflops barrier by 2020 through the Fugaku supercomputer, (and "it looks like China and France have a chance to do so and that the United States is content – for the moment at least – to wait until 2023 to break through the exaflops barrier.") These processors will also implement extensions to the ARMv8 architecture equivalent to HPC-ACE2 that Fujitsu is developing with Arm.

In June 2016, Sunway TaihuLight became the No. 1 system with 93 petaflops (PFLOPS) on the Linpack benchmark.

In November 2016, Piz Daint was upgraded, moving it from 8th to 3rd, leaving the US with no systems under the TOP3 for the 2nd time.

Inspur, based out of Jinan, China, is one of the largest HPC system manufacturers. As of May 2017, Inspur has become the third manufacturer to have manufactured a 64-way system – a record that has previously been held by IBM and HP. The company has registered over $10B in revenue and has provided a number of systems to countries such as Sudan, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Inspur was also a major technology partner behind both the Tianhe-2 and Taihu supercomputers, occupying the top 2 positions of the TOP500 list up until November 2017. Inspur and Supermicro released a few platforms aimed at HPC using GPU such as SR-AI and AGX-2 in May 2017.

Large machines not on the list

Some major systems are not on the list. A prominent example is the NCSA's Blue Waters which publicly announced the decision not to participate in the list because they do not feel it accurately indicates the ability of any system to do useful work.

Other organizations decide not to list systems for security and/or commercial competitiveness reasons. One such example is the National Supercomputing Center at Qingdao's OceanLight supercomputer, completed in March 2021, which was submitted for, and won, the Gordon Bell Prize. The computer is an exaflops computer, but was not submitted to the TOP500 list; the first exaflops machine submitted to the TOP500 list was Frontier. Analysts suspected that the reason the NSCQ did not submit what would otherwise have been the world's first exascale supercomputer was to avoid inflaming political sentiments and fears within the United States, in the context of the United States – China trade war. Similarly, government agencies like the National Security Agency formerly submitted their devices to the TOP500, only to stop after 1998.

Additional purpose-built machines that are not capable or do not run the benchmark were not included, such as RIKEN MDGRAPE-3 and MDGRAPE-4.

A Google Tensor Processing Unit v4 pod is capable of 1.1 exaflops of peak performance, while TPU v5p claims over 4 exaflops in Bfloat16 floating-point format, however, these units are highly specialized to run machine learning workloads and the TOP500 measures a specific benchmark algorithm using a specific numeric precision.

Tesla Dojo's primary unnamed cluster using 5,760 Nvidia A100 graphics processing units (GPUs) was touted by Andrej Karpathy in 2021 at the fourth International Joint Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CCVPR 2021) to be "roughly the number five supercomputer in the world" at approximately 81.6 petaflops, based on scaling the performance of the Nvidia Selene supercomputer, which uses similar components.

In March 2024, Meta AI disclosed the operation of two datacenters with 24,576 H100 GPUs, which is almost 2x as on the Microsoft Azure Eagle (#3 as of September 2024), which could have made them occupy 3rd and 4th places in TOP500, but neither have been benchmarked. During company's Q3 2024 earnings call in October, M. Zuckerberg disclosed usage of a cluster with over 100,000 H100s.

Computers and architectures that have dropped off the list

IBM Roadrunner is no longer on the list (nor is any other using the Cell coprocessor, or PowerXCell).

Although Itanium-based systems reached second rank in 2004, none now remain.

Similarly (non-SIMD-style) vector processors (NEC-based such as the Earth simulator that was fastest in 2002) have also fallen off the list. Also the Sun Starfire computers that occupied many spots in the past now no longer appear.

The last non-Linux computers on the list – the two AIX ones – running on POWER7 (in July 2017 ranked 494th and 495th, originally 86th and 85th), dropped off the list in November 2017.