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El Capitan Retains Top Spot in 65th TOP500 List as Exascale Era Expands

The 65th edition of the TOP500 showed that the El Capitan system retains the No. 1 position. With El Capitan, Frontier, and Aurora, there are now 3 Exascale systems leading the TOP500. All three are installed at Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories in the United States.

The El Capitan system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, remains the No. 1 system on the TOP500. The HPE Cray EX255a system was measured with 1.742 EFlop/s on the HPL benchmark. LLNL now also submitted a measurement for the HPCG benchmark, achieving 17.41 Petaflop/s, which makes the system the new No. 1 on this ranking as well.

El Capitan has 11,039,616 cores and is based on AMD 4th generation EPYC processors with 24 cores at 1.8 GHz and AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators. It uses the HPE Slingshot interconnect for data transfer and achieves an energy efficiency of 60.3 Gigaflops/watt. El Capitan is the 3rd system exceeding the Exaflop mark on the HPL benchmark.

The Frontier system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, is the No. 2 system on the TOP500. Frontier has been remeasured with an HPL score of 1.353 EFlop/s.  

Frontier is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and is equipped with AMD 3rd generation EPYC 64C 2GHz processors. The system has 8,699,904 total cores and also relies on HPE Slingshot interconnect for data transfer.  

The Aurora system at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, Illinois, was submitted with 1.012 EFlop/s on the HPL benchmark, which keeps it in the No. 3 spot on the TOP500. 

Aurora is built by Intel based on the HPE Cray EX - Intel Exascale Compute Blade, which uses Intel Xeon CPU Max Series processors and Intel Data Center GPU Max Series accelerators, which communicate through HPE Slingshot interconnect.

The JUPITER Booster system at the EuroHPC / Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany at No. 4 is the only new system in the TOP 10. 

JUPITER - JU Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research – was announced as the first EuroHPC exascale supercomputer (see https://jupiter.fz-juelich.de). It is currently being commissioned and has achieved a preliminary HPL value of 793.4 Petaflop/s on a partial system. The system is located at the Forschungszentrum Jülich campus in Germany and is operated by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. It is based on the Eviden’s BullSequana XH3000 direct liquid-cooled architecture.

Here is a summary of the system in the Top 10:

  • The El Capitan system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, remains the No. 1 system on the TOP500. The HPE Cray EX255a system was measured with 1.742 EFlop/s on the HPL benchmark. El Capitan has 11,039,616 cores and is based on AMD 4th generation EPYC™ processors with 24 cores at 1.8 GHz and AMD Instinct™ MI300A accelerators. It uses the HPE Slingshot interconnect for data transfer and achieves an energy efficiency of 58.9 Gigaflops/watt. The system also achieved 17.41 Petaflop/s on the HPCG benchmark which makes it the new leader on this ranking as well

  • Frontier is the No. 2 system in the TOP500. This HPE Cray EX system was the first US system with a performance exceeding one EFlop/s. It is installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee,  where it is operated for the DOE. It currently has achieved 1.353 EFlop/s using 8,699,904 cores. The HPE Cray EX architecture combines 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ CPUs optimized for HPC and AI, with AMD Instinct™ 250X accelerators, and a Slingshot interconnect.

  • Aurora is currently the No. 3 with a HPL score of 1.012 EFlop/s. It is installed at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, Illinois, where it is also operated for the DOE. This new Intel system is based on HPE Cray EX - Intel Exascale Compute Blades. It uses Intel Xeon CPU Max Series processors, Intel Data Center GPU Max Series accelerators, and a Slingshot interconnect. 

  • JUPITER Booster is the new No. 4 system. It is installed at EuroPHC/FZJ in Jülich, Germany where it is operated by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. It is based on the Eviden’s BullSequana XH3000 direct liquid cooled architecture which utilizes Grace Hopper Superchips. It is currently being commissioned and achieved a preliminary HPL value of 793.4 Petaflop/s on a partial system.

  • Eagle the No. 5 system is installed by Microsoft in its Azure cloud. This Microsoft NDv5 system is based on Xeon Platinum 8480C processors and NVIDIA H100 accelerators and achieved an HPL score of 561 Petaflop/s. 

  • The No. 6 system is called HPC6 and installed at Eni S.p.A center in Ferrera Erbognone in Italy. It is another HPE Cray EX235a system with 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ CPUs optimized for HPC and AI, with AMD Instinct™ 250X accelerators, and a Slingshot interconnect. It achieved 477.9 Petaflop/s.

  • Fugaku, the No. 7 system, is installed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan. It has 7,630,848 cores which allowed it to achieve an HPL benchmark score of 442 Petaflop/s.  It is now the second fastest system on the HPCG benchmark with 16 Teraflop/s. 

  • The Alps system installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Switzerland is now at No. 8. It is an HPE Cray EX254n system with NVIDIA Grace 72C and NVIDIA GH200 Superchip and a Slingshot interconnect. It achieved 434.9 Petaflop/s.

  • The LUMI system, another HPE Cray EX system installed at EuroHPC center at CSC in Finland is at the No. 9 with a performance of 380 Petaflop/s. The European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) is pooling European resources to develop top-of-the-range Exascale supercomputers for processing big data. One of the pan-European pre-Exascale supercomputers, LUMI, is located in CSC’s data center in Kajaani, Finland.

  • The No. 10 system Leonardo is installed at another EuroHPC site in CINECA, Italy. It is an Atos BullSequana XH2000 system with Xeon Platinum 8358 32C 2.6GHz as main processors, NVIDIA A100 SXM4 40 GB as accelerators, and Quad-rail NVIDIA HDR100 Infiniband as interconnect. It achieved a HPL performance of 241.2 Petaflop/s.

Other TOP500 Highlights

The 65th edition of the TOP500 found AMD and Intel processors to be the preferred option for systems in the Top 10. Five systems use AMD processors (El Capitan, Frontier, HPC6, LUMI, and Alps), while three systems use Intel (Aurora, Eagle, Leonardo). JUPITER Booster relies on a Grace Hopper Superchip, and Fugaku continues to use a proprietary ARM-based Fujitsu A64FX.

Seven of the computers in the Top 10 use the Slingshot interconnect (El Capitan, Frontier, Aurora, HPC6, Alps, LUMI, and JUPITER Booster), while two others use Infiniband (Eagle and Leonardo). Fugaku retains its proprietary Tofu interconnect.

While China and the United States were once again the countries that earned the most entries on the entire TOP500 list, China’s participation continues to decline. The United States added two systems to the list, bringing its total number of systems to 173. China dropped its number of representative machines from 63 to 46 and, as with the previous list, did not introduce any new machines. Germany continues to close the gap, now with 43 machines on the list. By continent, North America leads with 187 systems, followed by Europe with 163 systems, and Asia with 135 systems.

GREEN500 Results

This edition of the GREEN500 saw no changes since November 2024.

JEDI once again claimed the No. 1 spot – JUPITER Exascale Development Instrument, a system from EuroHPC/FZJ in Germany. JEDI repeated its energy efficiency rating from the last list at 72.73 GFlops/Watt while producing an HPL score of 4.5 PFlop/s. JEDI is a BullSequana XH3000 machine with a Grace Hopper Superchip, an NVIDIA GH200 Superchip, Quad-Rail NVIDIA InfiniBand NDR200, and 19,584 total cores.

The ROMEO-2025 system claimed the No. 2 spot on this edition’s GREEN500 at the ROMEO HPC Center in Champagne-Ardenne, France. This system premiered with an energy efficiency rating of 70.91 GFlops/Watt and an HPL benchmark of 9.863 PFlop/s. The architecture is identical to JEDI but is twice as large, resulting in slightly lower energy efficiency.

The No. 3 spot was taken by the Adastra 2 system at the Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif - Centre Informatique National de l'Enseignement Suprieur (GENCI-CINES) in France. This is a HPE Cray EX255a system with AMD 4th Gen EPYC 24 core 1.8GHz processors, AMD Instinct MI300A accelerator, and HPE Slingshot interconnect, running RHEL. With 16,128 cores total it achieved 2.529 PFlop/s HPL performance and an efficiency of 69.1 GFlops/Watt.
The El Capitan system and the Frontier system both deserve honorable mentions. El Capitan, with its top-scoring HPL benchmark of 1.742 EFlop/s, managed to secure the No. 26 spot on the GREEN500 with an energy efficiency score of 58.89 GFlops/Watt. Frontier, No. 2 on the TOP500, produced an energy efficiency score of 54.98 GFlops/Watt for this GREEN500 list. Both systems demonstrate that it is possible to achieve immense computational power while also prioritizing energy efficiency

HPCG Results

The TOP500 list has incorporated the High-Performance Conjugate Gradient (HPCG) benchmark results, which provide an alternative metric for assessing supercomputer performance. This score is meant to complement the HPL measurement to give a fuller understanding of the machine.

  • El Capitan is the new leader on the HPCG benchmark with 17.1 HPCG-PFlop/s.

  • Supercomputer Fugaku, the long-time leader, is now in second position with 16 HPCG-PFlop/s.

  • The DOE system Frontier at ORNL remains in the third position with 14.05 HPCG-PFlop/s.

  • The Aurora system is now in fourth position with 5.6 HPCG-PFlop/s.

HPL-MxP Results (Formerly HPL-AI)

The HPL-MxP benchmark seeks to highlight the use of mixed precision computations. Traditional HPC uses 64-bit floating point computations. Today, we see hardware with various levels of floating-point precisions – 32-bit, 16-bit, and even 8-bit. The HPL-MxP benchmark demonstrates that by using mixed precision during computation, much higher performance is possible. By using mathematical techniques, the same accuracy can be computed with a mixed-precision technique when compared with straight 64-bit precision.

  • This year’s winner of the HPL-MxP category is the El Capitan system with 16.7 EFlop/s.

  • The second spot was captured by Aurora with a score of 11.6 EFlop/s

  • The No. 3 spot goes to Frontier with 11.4 EFLOP/s.

About the TOP500 List

The first version of what became today’s TOP500 list started as an exercise for a small conference in Germany in June 1993. A second version of the list was compiled in November 1993 for the SC93 conference. Comparing both editions to see how things had changed the authors realized how valuable this information was and continued to compile statistics about the market for HPC systems based on it. The TOP500 is now a much-anticipated, much-watched and much-debated twice-yearly event.