Computing · Frontier Systems

TOP500 #1 Systems

A public scoreboard for the fastest machines humans can assemble.

The machine at the top of the list stands in for the whole frontier. Processors, memory, interconnects, power and cooling have to arrive together, and the benchmark measures the assembly rather than any one part of it. TOP500 has tracked the field since 1993, from gigaflops to the exascale era: Frontier broke the exaflop barrier in 2022, El Capitan pushed past 1.8 exaflops, and LineShine now leads at nearly 2.2. Chips alone never get a machine there. Each new number-one is a networking result and an energy-efficiency result as much as a silicon one, because power and cooling increasingly bound what is buildable at all. The pace has cooled markedly. The top spot doubled roughly every year from 1993 to 2013, took about two years per doubling over the past decade, and has taken about four since Frontier first hit an exaflop. El Capitan held first place for well over a year before LineShine displaced it. The frontier is still moving; it is no longer moving at anything like its old rate.

Source: TOP500.org

Download the data: top500.csv · top500.json

TOP500 #1 Systems: every plotted point, in GFLOPS
YearValueNoteProjected
199359.7 GFLOPSCM-5
1994143 GFLOPSIntel XP/S 140
19971,068 GFLOPSASCI Red (1 TFLOPS)
20004,938 GFLOPSASCI White
200235,860 GFLOPSEarth Simulator
200470,720 GFLOPSBlue Gene/L
20081,026,000 GFLOPSRoadrunner (1 PFLOPS)
20102,566,000 GFLOPSTianhe-1A
201110,510,000 GFLOPSK Computer
201333,860,000 GFLOPSTianhe-2
201693,015,000 GFLOPSSunway
2018143,500,000 GFLOPSSummit
2020442,010,000 GFLOPSFugaku
20221,102,000,000 GFLOPSFrontier (1 EFLOPS)
20241,742,000,000 GFLOPSEl Capitan
20251,809,000,000 GFLOPSEl Capitan (remeasured)
20262,198,400,000 GFLOPSLineShine (2 EFLOPS)

All curves · The chart is drawn in your browser and needs JavaScript. Every number it plots is in the table above.