You can see the list yourself at https://top500.org/
TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer
41–50 of 90 posts
Re: TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer
#42> Why aren’t these AI companies submitting to the TOP500 to show off their computing prowess? my knowledge is 10+ years out of date, but once upon a time if they'd chosen to, Google could have had _several_ entries in the top 10 of the TOP500 list It's just poker, they didn't want to tip their hand
Also, would those 550k Blackwell have good FP64 performance? How would one even compare them?
Yeah, that's true. GPU flops are really impressive in fp16, and more recently fp8 and fp4. When the 40xx GPUs came out, Tim Dettmers had a really cool blog looking into the numbers, and for fp8 one 4090 GPU had enough flops to match the best supercomputer somewhere in the 2000s, with an 8x 4090 build being top for a few years more. It's insane. But it gets nowhere close on fp64, where most of the physics simulations and other usual supercomputer tasks shine.
Re: TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer
#43Extremely impressive accomplishment considering they did this with Chinese interconnects and Chinese chips. This is a wake up call.
TOP500 can be done with inexpensive silicon. It is more about a willingness to aggregate enough hardware in one place. As a benchmark, it tells you almost nothing about computing power or scalability for other applications because it doesn't exercise the bottlenecks most high-scale applications have.
> TOP500 can be done with inexpensive silicon.
Didn't the DoD at one point build a 1k+ PS3 cluster based on their multi-core chip and had a mini supercomputer CotS?
I remember Sony not liking that people were buying them for other things rather than gaming (iirc they were losing money on hardware at the time) so they bricked linux support soon after.
Re: TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer
#44> Why aren’t these AI companies submitting to the TOP500 to show off their computing prowess? my knowledge is 10+ years out of date, but once upon a time if they'd chosen to, Google could have had _several_ entries in the top 10 of the TOP500 list It's just poker, they didn't want to tip their hand
Why would the scientific computing people want to tip their hand? It’s an open secret that the main point of these mammoth FP64 compute machines is to simulate nuclear weapons detonations to comply with the CTBT you’d think that crowd would really not be fans of broadcasting their capabilities.
It is partly this and partly a funding vehicle for American next-gen computing. It is not that hard to estimate FP64 ballpark from a whole bunch of public statistics. And it takes a looot more than raw FLOPs to get a simulation working. And presumably a looot more to translate it into practice. And the openness makes it easier to talk to different vendors and not get in the way of them having all the H1Bs it takes to get these things to work.
Plus one think I like to say is that if a bullet is flying towards you, you could know everything about the chemistry of the gunpowder and the composition of the alloy without it affecting what happens next.
Re: TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer
#45Interesting to see PAC mentioned on the slide, I'd have assumed security features would be a waste of transistors on something so compute-optimized - but maybe they want to isolate workloads from each other?
Yes exactly. it means you can sell isolated work units. With cloud being, well, cloud, if you can do that, you then have a market, with bidders able to bid higher for more capacity right now, vs a lower bid for eventually.
Re: TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not nearly as true when you look at AI training clusters. They're basically supercomputers but without an FP64 focus. (These are the systems to which GP was referring at Google.)
Even before AI training clusters became important, Google has had an outstanding custom fabric (there's papers about it) together with the ability to tune NICs for their own cases, and "their own cases" meant nearly everything engineered within Google. Ethernet hardware has had low kernel latency and DMA for a long time; it's the rest of the stack that hurts. But as far back as the early 2010s (if not further back, t…
All that would not help you with an AI training cluster interconnect. See Amin Vahdat's keynote at HotInterconnects 2025. Everyone is building a fabric for this stuff from scratch (Google/Falcon, Amazon/EFA, Azure/MANA, Cornelis/CN5000, and obviously Mellanox).
Re: TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer
#47Would the AI “GW-scale” clusters be able to run the Top500 benchmarks meaningfully? And what might be the outcome?
> And what might be the outcome?
DoE compute budgets are ~10B USD across labs. AI training is a trillion-dollar workload. Different league.
Re: TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer
#48And you know it needs a well-conceived OS to be able to run it: it's got to be... Microsoft Windows right?
The OS powering 0% of the 500 supercomputers of the Top 500. But this time, it has to be Windows, right? Amirite?
Ah, no, just kidding: it's "Kylin OS". It used to be a BSD derivative and now it's just based on Linux.
I know, I know: "It's a heavily modified Linux". Whatever, it's not Windows and that makes me very happy.
Re: TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer
#49> Why aren’t these AI companies submitting to the TOP500 to show off their computing prowess? my knowledge is 10+ years out of date, but once upon a time if they'd chosen to, Google could have had _several_ entries in the top 10 of the TOP500 list It's just poker, they didn't want to tip their hand
Why would the scientific computing people want to tip their hand? It’s an open secret that the main point of these mammoth FP64 compute machines is to simulate nuclear weapons detonations to comply with the CTBT you’d think that crowd would really not be fans of broadcasting their capabilities.
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