“Reflecting the strong emerging trend of cluster computing in
high-performance computing (HPC), the team which has compiled the
TOP500 list of global supercomputing sites has developed a similar
list to rank the world’s top 100 cluster computing systems.”
“A variety of concepts and technologies are used to build these
clusters and they are used for quite different applications. “It is
quite possible that by the middle of this decade clusters in their
myriad forms will be the dominant high-end computing architecture,”
said Thomas Sterling of the California Institute of Technology and
the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in his editorial for the start
of this new project.”
“Currently there is no publicly available basis which would
allow the compilation of statistics about different technologies
and the application areas of cluster computing. To provide a basis
for these statistics about cluster computing, the TOP500 team
therefore decided to assemble a separate list of high-performance
computing clusters called “Clusters@ TOP500.”