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Data

Computational capacity of the fastest supercomputers

What you should know about this indicator

The Top500 list the 500 fastest computer system being used today. In 1993 the collection was started and has been updated every 6 months since then. The report lists the sites that have the 500 most powerful computer systems installed. The best Linpack benchmark performance achieved is used as a performance measure in ranking the computers. The TOP500 list has been updated twice a year since June 1993.

The Linpack Benchmark is a measure of a computer’s floating-point rate of execution. It is determined by running a computer program that solves a dense system of linear equations. The paper “The LINPACK Benchmark: Past, Present, and Future” by Jack Dongarra, Piotr Luszczek, and Antoine Petitet provides a look at the details of the benchmark and provides performance data in graphics form for a number of machines on basic operations. A copy of the paper is available at http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/hpl.pdf

Source
Dongarra et al. (2023) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
April 22, 2024
Next expected update
April 2025
Date range
1993–2023
Unit
gigaFLOPS

Related research and writing

What is Moore's Law?

Max Roser, Hannah Ritchie and Edouard Mathieu

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Retrieved on
April 22, 2024
Retrieved from
https://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Jack Dongarra, Martin Meuer, Horst Simon, Erich Strohmaier. TOP500, Performance Development

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Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Computational capacity of the fastest supercomputers”. Our World in Data (2024). Data adapted from Dongarra et al.. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/supercomputer-power-flops [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Dongarra et al. (2023) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Dongarra et al. (2023) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Computational capacity of the fastest supercomputers” [dataset]. Dongarra et al., “TOP 500” [original data]. Retrieved December 12, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/supercomputer-power-flops