I’ve worked on several systems that had enough flop/s to make it in the top 5-10, but for which we never submitted benchmarks. Sometimes their backend network layout technically would make them several smaller clusters for an HPL run, sometimes it’s because the cluster is too heterogeneous to get a good benchmark result, and sometimes it’s because the employer wants to keep a low profile.

Most of the time, it just that it’s a hassle. It takes a while to prep and tune a big hero run for benchmarking, and if you spend a billion dollars on a cluster, it’s making you a lot more than that. Taking it down for a day or two stops the money printers.

Also, would those 550k Blackwell have good FP64 performance? How would one even compare them?

Is there international value to these designations? As in, would it be worth it for the U.S. to pay a bonus to anyone who qualifies into the TOP500, to offset the cost of the run?

Why would the scientific computing people want to tip their hand? It’s an open secret that the main point of these mammoth FP64 compute machines is to simulate nuclear weapons detonations to comply with the CTBT you’d think that crowd would really not be fans of broadcasting their capabilities.

Cloud computing is not a supercomputer. Different architecture, bandwitch, interconnectivity and latencies.