This question is part of the Hill Climbing Round of the Forecasting AI Progress Tournament. You can view all other questions in this round here.
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.