Blue Gene is greenest supercomputer

By Stephen Withers
Thursday, 22 November 2007 09:45

Science - Energy

The Green500 list reranks the well-known Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers according to the number of floating-point operations delivered per watt, and IBM Blue Gene systems take nine of the top ten spots.

The ranking is based on the measured power consumed during a run of the Linkpack benchmark, or the peak power consumption if that figure was not provided.

The top five positions are occupied by Blue Gene/P systems ranked between 2 and 121 on the Top500, with eServer Blue Genes taking 7 to 27.

The odd one out in the Green500's top ten is Stanford University's Dell PowerEdge system, which is ranked 73 on the Top500.

That said, the systems in positions 28 to 31 (three of which were PowerEdges) were ranked on peak power rather than measured consumption and could therefore deserve higher places.

IBM and Dell have been making very public efforts to improve the energy efficiency of the systems they sell, along with other environmental measures.