The latest Top500 list saw El Capitan retain its top spot, having knocked Frontier down to second on the previous entry, measuring 1.742 EFlop/s on the High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark.
The top three remained the same, rounding out by Frontier and Aurora, but it was the entry of a new exascale system that made for the biggest news: Jupiter Booster.
Jupiter Booster is Europe’s first exascale supercomputer and entered the list at fourth spot, the only new entry in the Top 10, having achieved an HPL score of 793.4 Petaflop/s.
The Germany-based system isn’t yet finished either, with the Booster module alone comprising around 6000 compute nodes. It’s powered by Nvidia hardware, with each node housing four GH200 superchips, which combine four GPUs with a CPU to provide some serious computing power.
In the future, the Booster partition is set to be supported by a cluster partition, set to be supplied by the German firm ParTec, that’s designed for data-intensive tasks.
“With its enormous computing capacity, Jupiter opens up new possibilities in a wide range of application areas,” the Forschungszentrum Jülich, which houses the supercomputer, said in a statement.
“Climate and weather simulations can be enhanced and will significantly improve predictions of local extreme weather events, such as heavy rain and severe thunderstorms. Jupiter will also drive the development and optimisation of a sustainable energy system.”
The top 10 saw a few changes in the latest entry, with Microsoft’s Eagle dropping from fourth to five to make way for Jupiter Booster. Eagle was again the highest-ranked cloud-based system.
The rest of the top 10 remained the same, with HPC6 (which has the same architecture as Frontier) dropping from fifth to sixth, and Lumi down to ninth, having been eighth last time out.
It was yet another disappointing outing for Fujitsu’s Fugaku, as the once most powerful supercomputer in the world slipped to seventh, having fallen out of the top five on the last list.
Tuolumn, the HPE Cray and AMD-based system, was forced to make way for Jupiter Booster entering the top 10, with Leonardo rounding out the leaders.
The June 2025 edition of the Top500 was a boon for HPE, as six of the top 10 were built on its Cray technology, while four of the top 10 Green500 (more below) were built by HPE.
The entire top three are built on HPE Cray, powered by hardware from AMD and Intel, with all of its high-performing systems designed with its fanless direct liquid cooling system architecture.
Jupiter Booster, the newest top 10 system, was built on BullSequana’s XH3000 and is powered by Nvidia chips.
AMD and Intel were in fact the top choice by the leading systems for processes, with five choosing AMD (El Capitan, Frontier, HPC6, LUMI, and Alps), while three systems use Intel (Aurora, Eagle, Leonardo).
Jupiter Booster, the newest top 10 system, was built on BullSequana’s XH3000 and is powered by Nvidia chips, while Fugaku uses a proprietary Arm-based Fujitsu A64FX.
Notably, seven of the computers in the Top 10 use the Slingshot interconnect, while just two others use Infiniband (Eagle and Leonardo). Fugaku continued its use of proprietary tech with its Tofu interconnect.
Beyond the top 10, there were plenty of changes in the latest Top500 list.
Notably, Isambard-AI, the UK government-backed supercomputer, rose up the rankings to eleventh.
Earlier iterations of the £225 million, Bristol-based system only managed position 155 last time out, but stormed up the rankings this time out.
Prof. Simon McIntosh-Smith, director of the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing, said: “It’s been 23 years since the UK last had a supercomputer this high in the Top500.
‘We’re excited to see the impact that Isambard-AI is going to have in turbo-charging the UK’s AI ecosystem, and how it will enable us to become an AI maker, and not just an AI taker.”
Perlmutter, the HPE Cray-based system named after Nobel prize winner Saul Perlmutter, dropped out of the top 20, falling from position 19 to 25.
Meanwhile, SuperPOD, the highest-ranked supercomputer from the Middle East, fell from 15th to 32nd, just one place ahead of another system from the region, AI-03.
In terms of geographical split, the US continued to dominate the Top500, with almost half (nine) of the top 20 coming from the US, with a total of 173.
China, while high up on the list in terms of total systems, saw a noticeable drop this time out, with representative machines falling from 63 to 46 while failing to add any new machines to the second TOP500 list in a row.
China’s top-performing system was the Chinese Super Computing Center (Wuxi)-based Sunway TaihuLight, which finished 21st, down from 15.
It was a good list for European-based supercomputers, while just three from Asia made the top 20: South Korea’s SSC-24, and Japan’s Fugaku and ABCI 3.0.
The news out of the Green500, which ranks supercomputers based on their energy efficiency, was that there is no news, with no changes on the previous list.
That means JEDI took the gong for the greenest supercomputer in the world for the third straight list.
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A fellow BullSequana XH3000-based system, ROMEO-2025, kept hold of second place, while Adastra 2, the HPE and AMD-based unit operated by GENCI, France’s high-performance computing agency, again came third.
Isambard-AI continued to hold onto fourth place, having previously made its debut at second place.
The Top500 leader, El Capitan, secured the No. 25 spot on the Green500, while Frontier was the 31st greenest supercomputer, behind the Swedish system Berzelius.
