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Hopper Among World’s Top 10 Fastest Computers

One of only 10 Petaflops Systems Worldwide

June 17, 2011

Linda Vu, lvu@lbl.gov, +1 510 486 2402

There are only 10 computers in the world with petaflops power—capable of calculating quadrillions of calculations in one second. According to the 37th edition of the Top500 List, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s (NERSC’s) Cray XE6 “Hopper” system is one of them.  

All of the systems on the TOP500 List are ranked on how fast they run Linpack, a benchmark application developed to solve a dense system of linear equations. With a Linpack benchmark performance of 1.054 petaflops, Hopper ranks number 8 among the most powerful systems in the world. The system has a theoretical peak performance of 1.29 petaflops.

The 37th edition of the Top500 List was announced this morning at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. Since its inception 18 years ago, the list has been a standard indicator of computing performance and architecture trends.


About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility that serves as the primary high performance computing center for scientific research sponsored by the Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NERSC serves almost 10,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a DOE national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy. »Learn more about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab.