Figure 2 outlines this exponential
increase in advanced computing capability,
based on the widely used High-
Performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark6
and Top500 list of the world’s
fastest computers.16 Although solution
of dense linear systems of equations is
no longer the best measure of delivered
performance on complex scientific and
engineering applications, this historical
data illustrates how rapidly highperformance
computing has evolved.
Though high-performance computing
has benefited from the same semiconductor
advances as commodity com-puting, sustained system performance
has improved even more rapidly due to
increasing system size and parallelism.