The Captain Leads the TOP500 and Consolidates the Exascale Era: US Dominance and Europe’s Leap with JUPITER

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The 65th edition of the TOP500 supercomputer ranking confirms the unstoppable advance of the exascale era. The El Capitan system, installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (California, USA), maintains its position as the world’s most powerful supercomputer, with a record score of 1.742 exaflops on the HPL test, the international standard for measuring performance in scientific computing.

Three exascale systems at the top… and all in the USA.

For the first time, the TOP500 podium is completely occupied by supercomputers that surpass the exaflop and that are located in laboratories operated by the U.S. Department of Energy. Following El Capitan are Frontier (Oak Ridge, Tennessee) and Aurora (Argonne, Illinois), with 1.353 and 1.012 exaflops respectively.

  • El Capitan uses HPE Cray EX255a technology, 4th generation AMD EPYC processors, and AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators, summing more than 11 million cores and achieving an energy efficiency of 60.3 gigaflops/watt.
  • Frontier and Aurora use similar architectures, although Aurora relies on Intel GPU Max accelerators and Intel Xeon Max processors, consolidating U.S. leadership in both raw power and diversity of technology providers.

Europe breaks in with JUPITER, and Asia stagnates

The big news in the Top 10 is the entry of JUPITER Booster, the first European exascale supercomputer, in 4th place. Still in the commissioning phase, this system located at the Jülich Supercomputing Center (Germany) has already reached 793.4 petaflops in a partial configuration and represents a milestone for European technological autonomy.

Japan maintains the presence of Fugaku in 7th place, and China, while historically a leader, continues to refrain from incorporating new machines and sees its total number of systems on the list decrease.

Updates on energy efficiency: GREEN500

The commitment to efficiency is reflected in the GREEN500, a parallel ranking that measures energy performance. The JEDI system (Germany) retains its title as the most efficient in the world, with 72.73 gigaflops/watt. France places two of its systems, ROMEO-2025 and Adastra 2, among the top three. It is worth noting that El Capitan and Frontier, in addition to power, achieve high rankings in efficiency, demonstrating that supercomputing can progress without skyrocketing electricity consumption.

Summary of the Top 10 of the TOP500 (June 2025):

  1. El Capitan (USA): 1.742 exaflops (AMD, HPE Cray EX255a)
  2. Frontier (USA): 1.353 exaflops (AMD, HPE Cray EX235a)
  3. Aurora (USA): 1.012 exaflops (Intel, HPE Cray EX)
  4. JUPITER Booster (Germany): 793.4 petaflops (NVIDIA Grace Hopper, Eviden BullSequana)
  5. Eagle (USA, Microsoft Azure): 561 petaflops (Intel Xeon, NVIDIA H100)
  6. HPC6 (Italy): 477.9 petaflops (AMD, HPE Cray EX235a)
  7. Fugaku (Japan): 442 petaflops (ARM Fujitsu A64FX)
  8. Alps (Switzerland): 434.9 petaflops (NVIDIA Grace Hopper)
  9. LUMI (Finland): 380 petaflops (AMD, HPE Cray EX)
  10. Leonardo (Italy): 241.2 petaflops (Intel, NVIDIA A100)

Trends and global context

The TOP500 reflects the consolidation of AMD and Intel as the predominant processors in the most powerful systems, the rise of GPU accelerators for AI and data science, and the dominance of HPE Slingshot networks in node interconnection.

The United States accounts for 173 systems on the list and continues to lead, while Europe narrows the gap with 163. Asia, particularly China, shows a relative decline.

The exascale supercomputing is already a reality and is set to transform areas such as artificial intelligence, scientific simulation, energy, and personalized medicine. U.S. leadership is indisputable, but Europe and Asia continue an open race for technological sovereignty in the planet’s most advanced computing.

Source: top500