IBM dominates Green500 supercomputer list

By Stephen Withers
Friday, 25 July 2008 04:55

Science - Energy

IBM has smashed its competitors in the latest Green500 list of the most energy-efficient supercomputers, which shows that performance and running costs need not be diametrically opposed. The latest list shows that other supercomputer vendors are struggling to compete with IBM in the bang per Watt stakes.

Where the better known TOP500 list ranks supercomputers in terms of the number of calculations they can perform in a second, the Green500 adjusts this for the amount of energy consumed.

Equal first on the Green500 are two differently configured IBM BladeCenter QS22 clusters, one operated by IBM itself, the other by the Fraunhofer Institute. Both are rated at 488.14 MFLOPS/W (millions of floating point operations per second per watt).

These systems are ranked at a relatively lowly 324 and 464 on the TOP500, but the next entry is where things get interesting.

Number three on the Green500 is Roadrunner, the recently revealed petaflop BladeCenter system installed at the US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.

This system currently heads the TOP500 list, and despite burning a massive 2345.5kW, it is so fast that it achieves 437.43 MFLOPS/W.

This is the first time that the top three computers on the Green500 have delivered more than 400 MFLOPS/W.

The next 12 systems are all IBM Blue Gene/P configurations delivering around 360 to 370 MFLOPS/W.

Do any other manufacturers get a look in? Find out on page 2.