Supercomputers have become a vital part of almost any innovative project undertaken by collaborative teams in the developed world. Server clusters can be found anywhere from the offices of small businesses to compartments in U.S. Navy submarines.
So which are the fastest supercomputers on earth? The usual measurement for high-performance computer (HPC) clusters is the TOP500 ranking, which is based on the High Performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark. LINPACK stands for “linear equations software package”, and the benchmark measures how fast a supercomputer can solve a system of linear equations. The results are reported in units of billions of floating point operations per second (GFLOPS).
The high-performance LINPACK metric has long been the established standard for measuring computing performance, with intense competition worldwide for the lead spot in the TOP500. But some scientists criticize the TOP500 ranking for creating an incomplete picture of how to measure performance. The risk, as Mark Anderson describes in an article in IEEE Spectrum magazine, is motivating computer hardware manufacturers to develop less-effective technologies.