ACM SIGHPC TOP500 Bylaws

Statement of Purpose

The primary goal of the TOP500 subcommittee is to present a ranked overview of the world’s fastest computational systems, specifically those capable of executing large-scale, floating-point-intensive numerical applications. The systems included are intended to represent the broader market for general-purpose floating-point supercomputers, regardless of their specific use cases. The TOP500 Project includes the following lists: TOP500, Green500, HPCG, and HPL-MxP.

ACM SIGHPC’s TOP500 subcommittee is responsible for the biannual submission process, review, generation, and publication of the TOP500 lists. Publication includes developing the press release and creating content for publication in the ACM Digital Library.

Organizational Structure

The TOP500 Supercomputer Project shall be guided by two subcommittees under the umbrella of ACM SIGHPC. The Steering Committee will report directly to SIGHPC. The Technical Committee reports to the Steering Committee.

• A steering committee for questions and topics about strategic directions, general governance, and community involvement and interactions. The steering committee is responsible for organizing press releases and conference sessions for the SC and ISC Conferences.  

• A technical committee responsible for the maintenance of the TOP500 assets and production of the bi-annual TOP500 Supercomputer List. The technical committee is responsible for generating the artifacts for the list, including the online publications, drafting the press release, and printing the certificates as needed. 

• ACM membership is required for all members of the steering and technical committees. 

Steering Committee

The Steering Committee is meant to represent the interests of the research and industrial communities in the direction, maintenance, and development of the TOP500 Supercomputer Project.

The Steering Committee provides guidance to the Technical Committee about:

• Data collection 

  • Additional technical data of interest 

  • Data that is no longer of interest

• Benchmark selection

• Data presentation on the web

• Rules for running the benchmark

Technical Committee

The Technical Committee should comprise TOP500 Authors, benchmark representatives, and SIGHPC members closely involved in maintaining and producing TOP500 assets. 

Members of the committee are responsible for organizing: 

• Producing the bi-annual TOP500 List 

• Long-term development and updates to the TOP500 assets, such as databases and websites

• Maintaining the Green500-related data

• Maintaining a copy of the HPCG and HPL-MxP benchmarks data, and 

• other benchmark data as needed. 

Schedule of Activities

The TOP500 committees are responsible for publishing the TOP500 list twice a year at the ISC and SC Conferences. 

The Technical Committee is responsible for running the submission, review, list production, and final list publication at each conference.  The official release of the list is typically on conference Mondays, either during a press conference or at the start of the main program. 

Meeting Expectations

Members of both committees should be available to meet as required by the committee.  

• For the Steering Committee, this is expected to occur twice a year, near the time of the list's publication. 

• For the Technical Committee, this is expected to be approximately three meetings before and after list publication to prepare the list, then review and implement the required changes. 

Committee Membership

Steering Committee

The Steering Committee will comprise 7 members, each serving a 3-year term. In accordance with ACM’s policy, members will have a maximum of two terms. An exception to these term limits will be granted for the original TOP500 Authors (Dongarra, Strohmaier, Simon, and Feng).  

The Steering Committee will vote to elect one member to serve as chair each year; normally, this will occur in that person's second cycle. The SIGHPC chair role will not be part of the nomination process and will not serve as chair of the committee.

The common understanding is to include experts from around the world.

Initial membership of the Steering Committee will include:

• Jack Dongarra

• Erich Strohmaier

• Horst Simon

• Christine Harvey, the SIGHPC chair

• Satoshi Matsuoka (4 year term)

• Wu Feng

• Anders Jensen, as Representative from EuroHPC JU (2 year term)

Technical Committee

The Technical Committee shall include core members (experts per benchmark), database members, and appointed members (as needed). 

Initial membership will include:

• Jack Dongarra 

• Erich Strohmaier

• Piotr Luszczek

• Greg Veldman

• Wu Feng

• SigHPC Rep for communications (for Press release etc)

The Technical Committee will have a chair appointed by the Steering Committee. 

Publication

Authors of the list will follow ACM’s Policy on Authorship. 

Voting

Steering Committee

The Steering Committee shall strive to resolve all issues under deliberation through consensus and consultation with members. A simple majority voting process will be used to decide on issues, but only when a quorum of 5 voting members is present. In the case of a tie, the chair is granted one additional vote in decision-making. 

Notwithstanding the foregoing, any amendment to this charter shall require an affirmative vote of at least two-thirds (2/3) of the voting members present, provided that a quorum is met.

Technical Committee

The Technical Committee will not have voting responsibilities. The Steering Committee should resolve any subject for debate. 

Nomination and Selection Process

Steering Committee

Following the initial year with selected members, the committee will host a nomination period and will choose new members as term limits are reached. 

An open call will be posted for committee members. The current committee will vote to accept new members by a simple majority vote.

Technical Committee

Members of the Technical Committee will be appointed by the Steering Committee by a simple majority vote. 

Vacancies

If a vacancy occurs on either committee, the Steering Committee may appoint and approve a new member by a simple majority vote. The new member’s term will end when the original member’s term would have ended.  

Appendix A - Detailed Timeline for Publication

This timeline tries to list all major steps with tight but manageable dates – earlier would be better.

• Ongoing activities to make submission and production easier

  • Monitoring and answering community questions submitted to TOP500

  • Update technology tables with new models of chips, nodes, networks, and such.

  • Update email distribution lists as needed

• Friday 4 weeks before publication [-24 days]: 

  • Official deadline for submissions 

  • Placeholders for new systems should be submitted with preliminary data for a chance to further update results

  • Start checking for submission inconsistencies and errors to ask for clarification 

• Friday 3 weeks before publication [-17 days]: 

  • Typical extension for updates to existing submissions 

  • Prepare Media Advisory with dates of publication

  • Check for data people have prepared but did not submit – often an oversight 

• Friday 2 weeks before publication [-10 days]

  • Final deadline extension:  This is the absolute final opportunity to update any previously submitted data. Please do not request extensions beyond this date, as the timeline is already extremely tight.

  • All required data must be submitted by this deadline. The majority of data should be received at least one week in advance to ensure timely processing.

• Over the weekend, all the new data gets integrated into a copy of the DB

• Monday, one week before publication [-7 days]

  • Draft goes to TOP500 editors (excel file) with a list of open inquiries to submitters (if any)

  • Draft of Green500 goes to respective editors

  • HPCG and HPL-MxP data need to be updated and verified

  • TOP10 gets finalized

    • Agenda for conference or BoF Awards can be finalized

    • Certificates get updated 

      • send for internal review and then 

      • send to the print shop

    • Awards Recipients can get invited

  • Vendor Review lists (all systems with their label without ranking information) get sent to main/ interested submitting companies for 24-hour final review.

• Wednesday am [-5 days]

  • List gets finalized

  • Compile Highlights (semi-automatic), including data from TOP500, Green500, HPCG, and HPL-MxP. 

  • Start drafting the press release 

  • Draft published artifact (press release + list)

  • Start prepping closed copy of the website with new data and all additional files – check all functionality (lists, sub-list generation, graphs, excel files etc)

• Thursday [-4 days]

  • Finalize materials and final reviews

  • Finalize pre-release website and enable password access for all 

  • Send Media Advisory to email-lists for Authors, Sites, Vendors, Press 

• Friday-Sunday 

  • Make final corrections on pre-release once daily with a change-log entry if needed.

• Monday [0 days]

  • At publication time, the new webpages replace previous content