High-Performance Computing Today

In 1993 for the first time a list of the top 500-supercomputer sites worldwide has been made available. The Top500 list allows a much more detailed and well-founded analysis of the state of high performance computing. This paper summarizes some of the most important observations about HPC as seen through the Top500 statistics. The major trends we document here are the continued dominance of the world market in HPC by the U.S., the completion of a technology transition to commodity microprocessor based highly parallel systems, and the increased industrial use of supercomputers in areas previously no represented on the TOP500 list. The scientific community has long used the Internet for communication of email, software, and papers. Until recently there has been little use of the network for actual computations. The situation is changing rapidly with a number of systems available for performing grid based computing.