The Green500 List reveals world’s 10 greenest supercomputers

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by Shane Henson — July 18, 2011—The world’s 10 greenest supercomputers have been named in the latest release of The Green500 List, a ranking of the energy efficiency of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers by The Green500. The list serves as a complement to the well-known supercomputer industry marker TOP500.

According to The Green500, this year’s 10 greenest supercomputers are:

  1. NNSA/SC Blue Gene/Q Prototype 2 at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
  2. NNSA/SC Blue Gene/Q Prototype 1 at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
  3. DEGIMA Cluster, Intel i5, ATI Radeon GPU, Infiniband QDR at Nagasaki University
  4. HP ProLiant SL390s G7 Xeon 6C X5670, Nvidia GPU, Linux/Windows at GSIC Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology
  5. iDataPlex DX360M3, Xeon 2.4, nVidia GPU, Infiniband at CINECA / SCS – SuperComputing Solution
  6. K computer, SPARC64 VIIIfx 2.0GHz, Tofu interconnect at RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS)
  7. QPACE SFB TR Cluster, PowerXCell 8i, 3.2 GHz, 3D-Torus at Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ)
  8. QPACE SFB TR Cluster, PowerXCell 8i, 3.2 GHz, 3D-Torus at Universität Regensburg
  9. QPACE SFB TR Cluster, PowerXCell 8i, 3.2 GHz, 3D-Torus at Universität Wuppertal
  10. Supermicro Cluster, QC Opteron 2.1 GHz, ATI Radeon GPU, Infiniband at Universität Frankfurt

Researchers for The Green500 list say of the ten greenest supercomputers in the world, two trends towards greener supercomputing have emerged: (1) aggregating many low-power processors à la IBM BlueGene/Q and the K Computer by Fujitsu at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science, and (2) using energy-efficient accelerators, typically from the gaming/graphics market, such as AMD Radeon GPU, NVIDIA Tesla Fermi GPU, Cell, and Intel Knights Corner, to complement the commodity CPUs from Intel and AMD.

Aggregating Many Low-Power Processors: As in the previous edition of the list, an IBM Blue Gene/Q prototype supercomputer tops this edition of the Green500. However, the Blue Gene/Q prototype that tops this list is different from the one that topped the last edition of the list in that it delivers significantly better performance but with the same number of processor cores and only a marginal increase in power consumption. The end result is a 2097 MFLOPS/W rating, the first supercomputer to surpass the 2000 MFLOPS/W bar. The fastest supercomputer in the world, the K supercomputer from RIKEN in Japan, also aggregates many low-power processors and is one of the greenest supercomputers in the world, coming in at #6 on the Green500.

Using Energy-Efficient Accelerators to Complement Commodity Processors (CPUs): The greenest accelerator-based supercomputer in the world is the DEGIMA Cluster, a self-built supercomputer from Nagasaki University in Japan. The DEGIMA Cluster is accelerated by AMD/ATI Radeon graphics processing units (GPUs) on a thrifty supercomputing budget of NZ$600,000 or approximately US$500,000. Six other accelerator-based machines round out the ten greenest supercomputers in the world—three with GPU accelerators (one more from AMD/ATI and two from NVIDIA) and three with cell-based accelerators from IBM.