In the seven decades since the invention of the point-contact transistor at Bell Labs, relentless progress in the development of semiconductor devices — Moore’s law — has been achieved despite regular warnings from industry observers about impending limits.

The TOP500 project collects and ranks system performance metrics of the most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November.

The TOP500 ranks high-performance computing (HPC) by recording how fast a computer system solves a dense n by n system of linear equations in double precision (64 bits) arithmetic on distributed-memory computers (TOP500, 2019). This is an implementation of the High Performance Computing Linpack Benchmark.

Historical data for TOP500 can be found here. Please make a copy by clicking "file" and then "make a copy" if you wish to edit it.