IBM shines on GREEN500 supercomputer list

By Stephen Withers
Monday, 23 November 2009 08:21

Science - Energy

IBM has taken an impressive 18 of the top 20 places on the latest Green500 list. The Green500 ranks the world's fastest supercomputers according to their energy efficiency.

The latest Green500 list was announced late last week, and 18 of the top 20 places were occupied by systems using IBM technology.

Equal first on 722.98 MFLOPS/W were a trio of QPACE clusters using PowerXCell 8i processors (an enhanced version of the Cell Broadband Engine, itself derived from IBM's 64-bit Power architecture).

Fourth to sixth spots were taken by BladeCenter clusters, also using the PowerXCell 81.

The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan's GRAPE-DR cluster came seventh, followed by the National SuperComputer Center in Tianjin/NUDT's TH-1 cluster (based on Intel Xeon CPUs).

After that, it was IBM Blue Gene/P systems all the way down to number 22.

"Supercomputers can no longer focus only on raw performance. The era of simply adding more processors is coming to a close," said David Turek, vice president, deep computing, IBM.

"Clients need to be able to run supercomputers anywhere, not only places that have cheap power. As the Green500 proves, IBM has focused on this issue for some time and is well positioned to usher in performance breakthroughs along with efficiency gains," he added.

The Green500 re-ranks the systems that make up the TOP500 list of the world's fastest computers according to energy efficiency.

The highest ranked TOP500 system in the first 40 spots in the GREEN500 list  was the 'Roadrunner' IBM BladeCenter at Los Alamos National Laboratories in the US. The number 2 performer according to the TOP500, the 122400 core system achieved peak performance of 1375775 GFLOPS. Its energy efficiency means it delivered 44.25MFLOPS/W.

In comparison, the world's fastest supercomputer - the AMD Opteron-based Cray XT5-HE known as 'Jaguar' at Oak Ridge National Laboratory - peaked at 2331000 GFLOPS, but only reached 44th place on the GREEN500 at a mere 253.07 GFLOPS/W.