In the November 2006 TOP500 ranking, IBM’s BlueGene/L was the world’s top supercomputer, with a reported Linpack result (Rmax) of 280.60 teraflops per second (TFlop/s). Second-place Red Storm reached 101.40 TFlop/s. The table below reproduces that dated ranking; it is a snapshot of performance on the benchmark, not a claim about which systems are fastest today or at every kind of computing task.
The November 2006 top 10
TOP500 ranked these systems by their reported Linpack performance, shown as Rmax. Rpeak is a separate theoretical peak-performance figure; TOP500 says it is calculated from advertised CPU clock rates, so it should not be mistaken for the measured ranking result. System names, sites, core counts and performance figures below are as reported in the November 2006 TOP500 archive.
| Rank | System and reported configuration | Site / country | Cores | Rmax (TFlop/s) | Rpeak (TFlop/s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | BlueGene/L — eServer Blue Gene Solution, IBM | DOE/NNSA/LLNL, United States | 131,072 | 280.60 | 367.00 |
| 2 | Red Storm — Sandia/Cray Red Storm, Opteron 2.4 GHz dual core, Cray/HPE | NNSA/Sandia National Laboratories, United States | 26,544 | 101.40 | 127.41 |
| 3 | BGW — eServer Blue Gene Solution, IBM | IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, United States | 40,960 | 91.29 | 114.69 |
| 4 | ASC Purple — eServer pSeries p5 575 1.9 GHz, IBM | DOE/NNSA/LLNL, United States | 12,208 | 75.76 | 92.78 |
| 5 | MareNostrum — BladeCenter JS21 Cluster, PPC 970, 2.3 GHz, Myrinet, IBM | Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain | 10,240 | 62.63 | 94.21 |
| 6 | Thunderbird — PowerEdge 1850, 3.6 GHz, Infiniband, Dell | NNSA/Sandia National Laboratories, United States | 9,024 | 53.00 | 64.97 |
| 7 | Tera-10 — NovaScale 5160, Itanium2 1.6 GHz, Quadrics, Bull | Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique (CEA), France | 9,968 | 52.84 | 63.80 |
| 8 | Columbia — SGI Altix 1.5 GHz, Voltaire Infiniband, HPE | NASA Ames Research Center/NAS, United States | 10,160 | 51.87 | 60.96 |
| 9 | TSUBAME Grid Cluster — Sun Fire x4600 Cluster, Opteron 2.4/2.6 GHz and ClearSpeed Accelerator, Infiniband, NEC/Sun | CII, Institute of Science Tokyo, Japan | 11,088 | 47.38 | 82.12 |
| 10 | Jaguar — Cray XT3, 2.6 GHz dual Core, Cray/HPE | DOE/SC/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, United States | 10,424 | 43.48 | 54.20 |
Power consumption is not included: the archive does not provide a value for every system in this top ten.
What stands out in this ranking
BlueGene/L was far ahead
BlueGene/L’s 280.60 TFlop/s Rmax was nearly 2.8 times Red Storm’s 101.40 TFlop/s. Its reported lead was larger than the difference between any other adjacent pair in the top ten.
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Architectures and suppliers varied
The list was not a contest between one type of machine. It included IBM Blue Gene and pSeries systems, Cray systems, and installations built with Dell, Bull, SGI and NEC/Sun hardware. The names and configuration descriptions in the archive reflect the systems as listed in that edition.
Places six through ten were more tightly grouped
Thunderbird, ranked sixth, reported 53.00 TFlop/s Rmax; tenth-place Jaguar reported 43.48 TFlop/s. That 9.52 TFlop/s span contrasts with the 179.20 TFlop/s gap between first and second.
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How to read Rmax and Rpeak
- Rmax: the reported Linpack performance used for this ranking. TOP500 gives it in TFlop/s, or trillions of floating-point operations per second.
- Rpeak: a theoretical peak figure calculated using advertised CPU clock rates, according to TOP500. It is not the achieved Linpack result.
- Core count: a hardware count, not the ranking metric. A larger core count does not by itself establish a higher Rmax.
Consequently, for example, MareNostrum’s Rpeak of 94.21 TFlop/s does not change its fifth-place position: its listed Rmax was 62.63 TFlop/s.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Where the November 2006 list fits historically
TOP500’s November 2006 archive is the specific edition represented here. TOP500 published rankings twice yearly at the time, so a June 2006 list would be a different snapshot.
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In its November 2006 highlights, TOP500 reported 3.54 PFlop/s in total performance across the 500 systems, compared with 2.79 PFlop/s six months earlier and 2.30 PFlop/s a year earlier. The highlights also counted 261 systems (52.2 percent) using Intel processors, 113 (22.6 percent) using AMD Opteron processors, and 359 (72 percent) labeled as clusters.
The same highlights noted that the Earth Simulator, previously No. 1 for five lists, had fallen to No. 14 and was no longer in the top ten. They described MareNostrum as the new No. 5 and Europe’s largest system at the time.
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