What is an exaflop?
An exaflop is one quintillion — 1018, a billion billion — floating-point operations per second. A machine that sustains that rate is described as exascale.
The units, in order
| Unit | Operations per second | Reached by the TOP500 leader |
|---|---|---|
| Gigaflop | 10⁹ (a billion) | before the list began |
| Teraflop | 10¹² (a trillion) | ASCI Red, June 1997 |
| Petaflop | 10¹⁵ (a quadrillion) | Roadrunner, June 2008 |
| Exaflop | 10¹⁸ (a quintillion) | Frontier, June 2022 |
When exascale arrived
The first system to record an exaflop on the TOP500’s LINPACK benchmark was Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which measured 1.102 EFlop/s on the June 2022 list. The current leader, El Capitan, runs at 1.742 EFlop/s.
How big a jump is that?
The first machine ever ranked number one, CM-5/1024 in June 1993, managed 59.7 GFlop/s. Today’s leader is roughly 29,179,229 times faster. That is the compounding the TOP500 has recorded twice a year since 1993.
Rmax and Rpeak
Rankings use Rmax, the best score a machine actually sustains on the LINPACK benchmark. Rpeak is the theoretical ceiling from adding up what the hardware could do if nothing ever waited on anything else. Rpeak is always the larger figure, and it is the one to be sceptical of — every number on this site is Rmax.