The "TOP500" Ranking of Supercomputers Begins

In June 1993 Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim,Germany, Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC / Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory began the compilation of the TOP500 project, ranking the 500 most powerful (non-distributed) computer systems. The project  published an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincided with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second one was presented in November at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference.

The project aimed to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark, written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.