[LINK] green grunt

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

The Green500 List 

 http://www.green500.org/lists/2009/06/list.php

 Welcome to the 5th edition of the Green500 List! 

Below are a few highlights from this edition of the list. 

1. The overall efficiency of supercomputers continues to improve. 

◦Average efficiency increased by 10% (98 MFlops/Watt -> 108 MFlops/Watt) 
which is of significant note given that the aggregate power of the list 
increased by 15% (200 MW -> 230 MW) over the previous release. In short, 
while the supercomputers on the Green500 are collectively consuming more 
power, they are using the power more efficiently than before. 

◦More machines above 200 Mflops/Watt fewer machines below 50 Mflops/Watt. 
As more powerful supercomputers supplant the less powerful, these new 
machines are performing their computations more energy efficiently.
 
2. A self-made accelerator-based supercomputer catapults into the #5 spot
   on the Green500. 

◦In addition to being highly energy efficient, the self-made GRAPE-DR is 
arguably the first Green500 supercomputer with more than a million 
processing elements: 2,097,152. Will this approach of aggregating many 
more less powerful processors for better overall performance be a trend 
to keep an eye on? 

3. Commodity processors continue to nip at the heels of previous- 
   generation custom processors. 

◦Four&six-core commodity processors keep improving in energy efficiency 
(265 Mflops/Watt to 273 MFlops/Watt) and surpass previous-generation 
custom processors. Now, 20 of the top 50 energy-efficient supercomputers 
utilize commodity processors. 

4.For the first time, maximum energy efficiency remains the same, but
  three 500-Mflops/Watt supercomputers drop out of the Green500. 

◦The three supercomputers that occupied the #2 spot on the November 2008 
Green500 are no longer computationally powerful enough to be considered 
among the TOP500 supercomputers in the world, thus providing further fuel 
to the argument for a "more inclusive" Green500. 

If the trend of performance doubling continues for the next list, the #1 
machine on this Green500 is unlikely to make it to the November 2009 
Green500 List. 


Listed below are the Top 10 most energy-efficient supercomputers in
the world, as of June 2009.

As actual consumed power can be much less than peak power, we explicitly 
note which form of power was used to rank the system and encourage all 
system stakeholders to report measured power.

Green500-Rank  MFLOPS/W  Site*  Computer*  Total Power (kW)  TOP500 Rank* 

1 536.24 Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational 
Modeling, University of Warsaw BladeCenter QS22 Cluster, PowerXCell 8i 
4.0 Ghz, Infiniband 34.63 422 

2 458.33 DOE/NNSA/LANL BladeCenter QS22/LS21 Cluster, PowerXCell 8i 3.2 
Ghz / Opteron DC 1.8 GHz, Infiniband 138.00 61 

2 458.33 IBM Poughkeepsie Benchmarking Center BladeCenter QS22/LS21 
Cluster, PowerXCell 8i 3.2 Ghz / Opteron DC 1.8 GHz, Infiniband 138.00 62 

4 444.94 DOE/NNSA/LANL BladeCenter QS22/LS21 Cluster, PowerXCell 8i 3.2 
Ghz / Opteron DC 1.8 GHz, Voltaire Infiniband 2483.47 1 

5 428.91 National Astronomical Observatory of Japan GRAPE-DR accelerator 
Cluster, Infiniband 51.20* 277 

6 371.67 ASTRON/University Groningen Blue Gene/P Solution 94.50 124 

7 371.67 IBM - Rochester Blue Gene/P Solution 126.00 84 

7 371.67 IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center Blue Gene/P Solution 126.00 
85 

7 371.67 Max-Planck-Gesellschaft MPI/IPP Blue Gene/P Solution 126.00 86 

7 371.67 Bulgarian State Agency for Information Technology and 
Communications (SAITC) Blue Gene/P Solution 63.00 245 

--

Cheers,
Stephen