The three-time No. 1 system maintains its title ahead of Frontier and Aurora in the latest TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory maintained its spot as the world’s fastest supercomputer, and thanks to expansion, the 1.8-exaflop system extended its lead over the rest of the pack.
El Capitan is once again followed by Frontier at No. 2 and Aurora at No. 3 on the latest TOP500 list. In fact, the 10 highest-ranked systems are unchanged from the June 2025 TOP500 list. In addition, the top three systems are all based at U.S. Department of Energy facilities.
El Capitan debuted in the top spot on the November 2024 list and furthered its lead thanks to more processors. The HPE Cray EX255a system measured in at 1.809 EFlops/s, a bump from the 1.742 EFlop/s it posted last June. It now has 11,340,000 cores and is based on AMD fourth-generation EPYC processors with 24 cores at 1.8 Ghz, AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators and the HPE Slingshot interconnect for data transfer.
Second-place Frontier at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory clocked an HPL score of 1.353 EFlop/s, which is same as in June. Based on the HPE Cray EX235z architectures and equipped with AMD third-generation EPYC 64C 2GHz processors, the Frontier systems has 9,066,176 total cores and also relies on HPE Slingshot interconnect for data transfer.
The third U.S. system, Aurora, based at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, was submitted with 1.012 EFlop/s on the HPL benchmark, which is unchanged from June. Built by Intel and 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.
In fourth place on the list is JUPITER (JU Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research) at the EuroHPC/Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany. It was being commissioned at the time of the last listing and made a preliminary HPL value of 793.4 Petaflop/s on a partial system. Now fully deployed, it has achieved a benchmark of exactly 1 Exaflop performance. It is built on an Eviden’s BullSequana XH3000 direct liquid-cooled architecture using Nvidia Grace Hopper GH200 chips with a total of 4,801,344 cores.
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 (LLNL), Livermore, Calif.
- HPL Score: 1.809 Exaflop/s
- System Model: HPE Cray EX255a
- Processors: AMD 4th Gen EPYC™ CPUs and AMD Instinct™ MI300A accelerators
- Total Core Count: 11,340,000
- Interconnect: HPE Slingshot 11
No. 2: Frontier
- Location: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Roane County, Tenn.
- HPL Score: 1.353 Exaflop/s
- System Model: HPE Cray EX235a
- Processors: AMD 3rd generation EPYC 64C 2GHz processors
- Total Core Count: 9,066,176
- Interconnect: HPE Slingshot 11
No. 3: Aurora
- Location: Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, Lemont, Ill.
- HPL Score: 1.012 Exaflop/s
- System Model: HPE Cray EX—Intel Exascale Compute Blade
- Processors: Intel Xeon CPU Max Series processors and Intel Data Center GPU Max Series accelerators
- Total Core Count: 9,264,128
- Interconnect: HPE Slingshot 11
No. 4: JUPITER Booster
- Location: Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) at Forschungszentrum, Jülich, Germany
- HPL Score: 1.000 Exaflop/s on a partial system
- System Model: Eviden’s BullSequana XH3000
- Processors: Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Super Chip and Super Chip 72C 3GHz
- Total Core Count: 4,801,344
- Interconnect: NVLink 4 and InfiniBand NDR200
No. 5: Eagle
- Location: Microsoft Azure cluster
- HPL Score: 561.20 Petaflop/s
- System Model: Microsoft NDv5
- Processors: Xeon Platinum 8480C 48C 2GHz, Nvidia H100
- 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: HPE Slingshot 11
No. 7: Supercomputer Fugaku
- Location: RIKEN Center for Computational Science, Kobe, Japan
- HPL Score: 442.01 Petaflop/s
- System Model: Supercomputer Fugaku
- 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: HPE Slingshot 11
No. 9: LUMI
- Location: EuroHPC Center at CSC in Finland
- HPL Score: 379.70 Petaflop/s
- System Model: AMD Optimized 3rd Generation EPYC 64C 2GHz
- Processors: AMD Instinct MI250X
- Total Core Count: 2,752,704
- Interconnect: HPE 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 November 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. Two U.S. systems dropped off the list since June, bringing its total number of systems to 171. China’s numbers dropped by six to a total of 40. Germany also fell to 40. By continent, North America leads with 190 systems (up three from June, all in Canada), followed by Europe with 153 systems (down from 163) and Asia with 141 systems (up six from June).
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s exascale El Capitan retained its ranking as the world’s fastest supercomputer on Top500 organization’s Nov. 2025 ranking with a verified 1.809 exaFLOPs. El Capitan’s smaller sibling system, Tuolumne, repeated at 12th on the list at 208.1 petaFLOPs.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/Garry McLeod
