IDC Balanced HPC Ratings -- a more meaningful and useful industry standard metric with the goals to:
Provide a more balanced way of making high-level comparisons of computers
Provide a tool to help make better high-level price/performance calculations
Help justify HPC purchases
Offset the problems with using peak
The TOP500 project was started to provide a basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing. Twice a year, a list of the sites operating the 500 most powerful computer systems is assembled and released. The best performance on the Linpack benchmark is used as performance measure for ranking the computer systems.