The El Capitan system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California maintained its title as the world’s fastest supercomputer, according to the latest TOP500 list released today. U.S.-based systems also won the second and third spots with long-time list leader Frontier at No. 2 and the Aurora system at No. 3.
The El Capitan System debuted in the top spot in November 2024 and continues to lead the pack. The HPE Cray EX255a system, which was measured with 1.742 EFlop/s on the HPL benchmark, has 11,039,616 cores and is based on AMD fourth-generation EPYC processors with 24 cores at 1.8 Ghz and AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators. Using the HPE Slingshot interconnect for data transfer, the El Capitan system achieves an energy efficiency of 60.3 Gigaflops/watt, making it the third system exceeding the Exaflop mark on the HPL benchmark.
In this 65TH edition of the TOP500, the Frontier System at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, has been remeasured with an HPL score of 1.353 EFlop/s. Based on the HPE Cray EX235z architectures and equipped with AMD third-generation EPYC 64C 2GHz processors, the Frontier systems has 8,699,904 total cores and also relies on HPE Slingshot interconnect for data transfer.
The third U.S.-based system, Aurora, based at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility in Illinois, was submitted with 1.012 EFlop/s on the HPL benchmark, keeping it in the No. 3 spot. Built by Intel based on the HPE Cray EX-Intel Exascale Compute Blade, the Aurora system communicates through HPE Slingshot interconnect and uses Intel Xeon CPU Max Series processors.
A newcomer to the list, the JUPITER (JU Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research) Booster system at the EuroHPC/Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany, was announced as the first EuroHPC exascale supercomputer and is located at the Forschungszentrum Jülich campus in Germany. It is currently being commissioned and has achieved a preliminary HPL value of 793.4 Petaflop/s on a partial system, and it is based on the Eviden’s BullSequana XH3000 direct liquid-cooled architecture.
Here’s a breakdown of specific details for the 10 fastest supercomputer systems on the TOP500 list for June 2025:
No. 1: El Capitan
- Location: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif.
- HPL Score: 1.742 Exaflop/s
- System model: HPE Cray EX255a
- Processors: AMD 4th generation EPYC processors with 24 cores at 1.8 GHz and AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators
- Total core count: 11,039,616 cores
- Interconnect: Slingshot 11
No. 2: Frontier
- Location: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, Tenn.
- HPL Score: 1.353 Exaflop/s
- System model: HPE Cray EX235a
- Processors: AMD 3rd generation EPYC 64C 2GHz
- Total core count: 8,699,904
- Interconnect: Slingshot 11
No. 3: Aurora
- Location: Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, Argonne, Ill.
- HPL Score: 1.012 Exaflop/s
- System Model: HPE Cray EX – Intel Exascale Compute Blades
- Processors: Intel Xeon CPU Max Series
- Total core count: 9,264,128
- Interconnect: Slingshot 11
No. 4: JUPITER Booster
- Location: Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) at Forschungszentrum, Jülich, German
- HPL Score: 793.4 Petaflop/s on a partial system
- System model: Eviden’s BullSequana XH3000
- Processors: GH Superchip 72C 3GHz
- Total core count: 4,801,344
- Interconnect: Quad-Rail Nvidia InfiniBand NDR200
No. 5: Eagle
- Location: Microsoft Azure cluster
- HPL Score: 561.2 Petaflop/s
- System model: Microsoft NDv5
- Processors: Xeon Platinum 8480C 48C 2GHz
- Total core count: 2,073,600
- Interconnect: Nvidia Infiniband NDR
No. 6: HPC6
- Location: Green Data Center Eni, Ferrera Erbognone, Italy
- HPL Score: 477.90 Petaflop/s
- System model: HPE Cray EX235a
- Processors: AMD Optimized 3rd Generation EPYC 64C 2GHz and AMD Instinct MI250X
- Total core count: 3,143,520
- Interconnect: Slingshot 11
No. 7: Supercomputer Fugaku
- Location: RIKEN Center for Computational Science, Kobe, Japan
- HPL Score: 442.01 Petaflop/s
- System model: Supercomputer Fugaku, Fujitsu cluster
- Processors: A64FX 48C 2.2Ghz
- Total core count: 7,630,848
- Interconnect: Tofu interconnect D
No. 8: Alps
- Location: Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Switzerland
- HPL Score: 434.90 Petaflop/s
- System model: HPE Cray EX254n
- Processors: Nvidia Grace 72C 3.1GHz and Nvidia GH200 Superchip
- Total core count: 2,121,600
- Interconnect: Slingshot 11
No. 9: LUMI
- Location: EuroHPC Center at CSC in Finland
- HPL Score: 379.70 Petaflop/s
- System model: HPE Cray EX235a
- Processors: AMD Optimized 3rd Generation EPYC 64C 2GHz
- Total core count: 2,752,704
- Interconnect: Slingshot 11
No. 10: Leonardo
- Location: CINECA data center in the Bologna Technopole, Bologna, Italy
- HPL Score: 241.20 Petaflop/s
- System model: Eviden BullSequana XH2000
- Processors: Xeon Platinum 8358 32C 2.56GHz
- Total core count: 1,824,768
- Interconnect: Quad-rail Nvidia HDR100 Infiniband
TOP500 history and highlights
The first iteration of the TOP500 list was created for a small conference in Germany in June 1993. The authors decided to continue compiling the list, which is now a twice-yearly event. Some highlights from the June 2025 TOP500 list include:
- Processors: AMD and Intel processors dominate systems in the Top 10. Five systems use AMD processors (El Capitan, Frontier, HPC6, LUMI, and Alps), and three systems use Intel (Aurora, Eagle, Leonardo). JUPITER Booster uses a Grace Hopper Superchip, and Fugaku uses a proprietary ARM-based Fujitsu A64FX.
- Interconnects: Seven of the computers in the Top 10 use the Slingshot interconnect (El Capitan, Frontier, Aurora, HPC6, Alps, LUMI, and JUPITER Booster), two use Infiniband (Eagle and Leonardo), and Fugaku uses its proprietary Tofu interconnect.
- Geographic distribution: China and the United States earned the most entries on the TOP500 list. The U.S. added two systems to the list, bringing its total number of systems to 173. China’s numbers dropped from 63 to 46. Germany isn’t far behind with 43 machines on the list. By continent, North America leads with 187 systems, followed by Europe with 163 systems and Asia with 135 systems.