Politicians, for example, tend to see a system’s TOP500 rank as a general rank that is valid for all applications, which of course is not true. The misinterpretation of the TOP500 results has surely led to a negative attitude towards Linpack. Any other benchmark would have been similarly specific, but would not have been so easily available for all systems – a very important factor, as compiling the TOP500 lists twice a year is a very complex process. And there was, and still is, no alternative to Linpack. We have been criticized for this choice from the very beginning, but now, after 20 years, we can say that it was exactly this choice that has made TOP500 so successful – Linpack therefore was a good choice. Therefore, any supercomputer – no matter what its architecture is – can make it into the TOP500 list, as long as it is able to solve a set of linear equations using floating point arithmetic. The benchmark we decided on was Linpack, which means that systems are ranked only by their ability to solve a set of linear equations, A x = b, using a dense random matrix A.
Our simple TOP500 approach does not define “supercomputer” as such, but we use a benchmark to rank systems and to decide on whether or not they qualify for the TOP500 list. The TOP500 project was launched in 1993 to improve and renew the Mannheim supercomputer statistics, which had been in use for seven years.
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