The 67th TOP500 list was released on Monday, June 22 at the ISC High Performance Conference 2026 in Hamburg and officially unveiled to the international high-performance computing community. Published twice a year, the TOP500 ranks the world’s most powerful supercomputers based on their performance in the LINPACK benchmark, which measures the ability of a system to solve large dense systems of linear equations.
NHR@FAU once again achieved a strong presence in the ranking with four entries. The GPU partition of the center’s newest supercomputer, Helma, reached an impressive #79 worldwide, highlighting its capabilities for highly parallel scientific workloads and AI applications. The recently commissioned CPU partition of Helma also entered the list for the first time, debuting at #271.
Alex and Fritz continue to demonstrate their reliability and scientific value. Alex, which entered operation in June 2022 ranked #351, while Fritz secured #379. Both systems remain heavily utilized by researchers across Germany and continue to provide substantial computing resources for a broad range of scientific disciplines.
The progression from Alex and Fritz to Helma reflects NHR@FAU’s ongoing strategy of providing a diverse and balanced HPC ecosystem. While Alex and Fritz were designed around large CPU-based compute capacities complemented by accelerator resources, Helma significantly expands these capabilities through dedicated CPU and GPGPU partitions. This heterogeneous architecture enables researchers to efficiently run traditional simulation workloads alongside emerging data-intensive and AI-driven applications, while also supporting research into energy-efficient computing and next-generation HPC technologies.
More information on the benchmark methodology and the rationale behind the use of LINPACK can be found on the official TOP500 website.