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TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer

127 points by rbanffy

by brianolson

7 subcomments

> 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my knowledge is 10+ years out of date, but once upon a time if they'd chosen to, Google could have had _several_ entries in the top 10 of the TOP500 list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

by jandrewrogers

2 subcomments

TOP500 hasn't been a particularly useful measure of practical computing power in modern systems for many years because what it measures isn't a significant bottleneck in most real systems. It has become a measure of how much money someone is willing to spend for bragging rights. (HPCG is better in that it is a bit more bandwidth focused but still pretty narrow.)
Most companies with huge systems don't participate.

by adrian_b

0 subcomment

Additional details in:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08633v1
https://www.servethehome.com/arm-cpus-take-number-1-in-lates...
https://www.top500.org/news/lineshine-debuts-no-1-top500-ent...

by 2OEH8eoCRo0

3 subcomments

Extremely impressive accomplishment considering they did this with Chinese interconnects and Chinese chips. This is a wake up call.

by flopsamjetsam

1 subcomments

> We think it is highly likely that these LX2 chiplets are etched using SMIC 7 nanometer processes at the N+3 refinement, and we base that on the fact that the chip only runs at 1.55 GHz. That is nowhere near the 3 GHz that SMIC can push with that process, but it is probably lower to get the memory and core speeds more balanced. [1]
Based on the ARMv9.2.
[1] https://www.nextplatform.com/hpc/2026/06/25/a-deep-dive-on-c...

by chrisss395

0 subcomment

I haven't kept up with the latest on supercomputing power, but I recall some years ago there being strong evidence that China had a couple of un-announced supercomputers that would have topped the charts. It makes me wonder what is publicly disclosed vs. actual.

by Retr0id

1 subcomments

Interesting 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?

by bfgpereira

0 subcomment

The TOP500 rank is not a count of nodes, GPUs, or aggregate FLOPS.
Many systems have the node count to be able to run such benchmarks, but are not optimized or even capable of running them. Having these systems run these large calculations in a sustained way, and performing, is what separates a bunch of nodes together in a data center from an actual cluster that is able to run a benchmark like HPL or HPCG.
To sustain 70 - 80% of peak performance across hundreds of thousands of cores, you need a real low-diameter, high-bandwidth, low-latency fabric and a balanced memory subsystem, running on a system w almost no failures or network issues. A loosely-coupled cluster with an oversubscribed fat-tree will 'run Linpack' and then post an Rmax that's a small fraction of its naive peak.
Also, have a look at the Green500, and the systems there. This is not about bragging rights vendors, this is about placing commodity hardware, tuning it, and bringing it up to health in a way that squeezes all of that last performance possible out of the clusters on those lists. That's the opposite of vendor flexing - it's a craft that you cannot see in a simple node count, as some have been comparing here.
If you ever worked on this field, and with the vendors at this scale, you would know. Its not easy, its actually very hard.
... and imagine you need to deploy this, systems at this scale, w technologies that are sometimes just emerging and sometimes even need proper field testing * every 6 months * to be able to reach the scale and stability to land on these lists.

by mlmonkey

0 subcomment

You can see the list yourself at https://top500.org/
Deep link: https://top500.org/lists/top500/list/2026/06/

by rbanffy

0 subcomment

I wonder if the CPUs can be obtained for, say, a deskside workstation.

by ziofill

2 subcomments

> Two cores are disabled per cluster.
I’m sure there is a good reason for this, which is..?

by Alien1Being

1 subcomments

China keeps winning....

by b33f

3 subcomments

Why are they not using GPUs? is it use cases that don't suit GPUs or because of the limitations they are imposing on themselves to use SMIC domestic chips?

by rippeltippel

1 subcomments

Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48658334

by lokimedes

3 subcomments

Would the AI “GW-scale” clusters be able to run the Top500 benchmarks meaningfully? And what might be the outcome?

by dgellow

0 subcomment

Just glad to see Hamburg mentioned :) Hope you all didn’t suffer too much through the current heatwave

by techsystems

1 subcomments

Is it the first to reach 2 exaflops?

by charcircuit

0 subcomment

Shouldn't AWS be considered the Number 1 super computer? The amount of compute, storage, memory, etc available is ginormous.

by amelius

0 subcomment

How many tokens/s? :)

by TacticalCoder

0 subcomment

And 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.