TOP500
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL benchmarks, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.
The most recent edition of TOP500 was published in June 2025 as the 65th edition of TOP500, while the next edition of TOP500 will be published in November 2025 as the 66th edition of TOP500. As of June 2025, the United States' El Capitan is the most powerful supercomputer in the TOP500, reaching 1742 petaFlops on the LINPACK benchmarks. As of submitted data until June 2025, the United States has the highest number of systems with 175 supercomputers; China is in second place with 47, and Germany is third at 41; the United States has by far the highest share of total computing power on the list. Due to secrecy of the latest Chinese programs, publicly known supercomputer performance share in China represents only 2% that of global as of June 2025.
The TOP500 list is compiled by Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and, until his death in 2014, Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany. The TOP500 project also includes lists such as Green500 and HPCG.
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 ; published a report in 1992, titled "Kahaner Report on Supercomputer in Japan" which had an immense amount of data.
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. 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 system notably uses Intel Data Center GPU Max. Arm-based system are also notable on the list in 4th, 7th 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., 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 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 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.
All the fastest supercomputers since the Earth Simulator supercomputer have used operating systems based on Linux., all the listed supercomputers use an operating system based on the Linux kernel.
Since November 2015, no computer on the list runs Windows. In November 2014, Windows Azure cloud computer was no longer on the list of fastest supercomputers, leaving the Shanghai Supercomputer Center's Magic Cube as the only Windows-based supercomputer on the list, until it also dropped off the list. It was ranked 436th in its last appearance on the list released in June 2015, while its best rank was 11th in 2008. There are no longer any Mac OS computers on the list. It had at most five such systems at a time, one more than the Windows systems that came later, while the total performance share for Windows was higher. Their relative performance share of the whole list was however similar, and never high for either. In 2004, the System X supercomputer based on Mac OS X once ranked 7th place.
It has been well over a decade since MIPS systems dropped entirely off the list though the Gyoukou supercomputer that jumped to 4th place in November 2017 had a MIPS-based design as a small part of the coprocessors. Use of 2,048-core coprocessors made the supercomputer much more energy efficient than the other top 10. At 19.86 million cores, it was by far the largest system by core-count, with almost double that of the then-best manycore system, the Chinese Sunway TaihuLight.
TOP500
, the number one supercomputer is El Capitan, 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. 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,Summit, a previously fastest supercomputer, is currently highest-ranked IBM-made supercomputer; with IBM POWER9 CPUs. Sequoia became the last IBM Blue Gene/Q model to drop completely off the list; it had been ranked 10th on the 52nd list.
Microsoft is back on the TOP500 list with six Microsoft Azure instances, with CPUs and GPUs from same vendors, the fastest one currently 11th, and another older/slower previously made 10th. And Amazon with one AWS instance currently ranked 64th. The number of Arm-based supercomputers is 6; currently all Arm-based supercomputers use the same Fujitsu CPU as in the number 2 system, with the next one previously ranked 13th, now 25th.
| Rank | Rmax Rpeak | Name | Model | CPU cores | Accelerator cores | Total cores | Interconnect | Manufacturer | Site country | Year | Operating system |
| 1 | 1,809.00 2,821.10 | El Capitan | HPE Cray EX255a | 1,080,000 | 10,260,000 | 11,340,000 | Slingshot-11 | HPE | Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory | 2024 | Linux |
| 2 | 1,353.00 2,055.72 | Frontier | HPE Cray EX235a | 614,656 | 8,451,520 | 9,066,176 | Slingshot-11 | HPE | Oak Ridge National Laboratory | 2022 | Linux |
| 3 | 1,012.00 1,980.01 | Aurora | HPE Cray EX | 1,104,896 | 8,159,232 | 9,264,128 | Slingshot-11 | HPE | Argonne National Laboratory | 2023 | Linux |
| 4 | 1,000.00 1,226.28 | JUPITER | BullSequana XH3000 | 1,694,592 | 3,106,752 | 4,801,344 | Quad-rail NVIDIA NDR200 Infiniband | Atos | EuroHPC JU , Jülich, | 2025 | Linux |
| 5 | 561.20 846.84 | Eagle | Microsoft NDv5 | 172,800 | 1,900,800 | 2,073,600 | NVIDIA Infiniband NDR | Microsoft | Microsoft | 2023 | Linux |
| 6 | 477.90 606.97 | HPC6 | HPE Cray EX235a | 213,120 | 2,930,400 | 3,143,520 | Slingshot-11 | HPE | Eni S.p.A , Ferrera Erbognone, | 2024 | Linux |
| 7 | 442.01 537.21 | Fugaku | Supercomputer Fugaku | 7,630,848 | - | 7,630,848 | Tofu interconnect D | Fujitsu | Riken Center for Computational Science | 2020 | Linux |
| 8 | 434.90 574.84 | Alps | HPE Cray EX254n | 748,800 | 1,372,800 | 2,121,600 | Slingshot-11 | HPE | CSCS Swiss National Supercomputing Centre Switzerland|size=14pxEUFINEUITAsndsndsndsndsndsndsndsndsndsndsndsnd |