Green500 segments to encourage participation, innovation

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The keepers of the Green500 list announced yesterday that they are expanding their approach to encourage participation and facilitate innovation in the space

Since its 2007 debut, the Green500 has ranked only the energy efficiency of the world’s 500 fastest performing supercomputers. Now, the Green500 is expanding the definition of a supercomputer to include a wider spectrum of the high-end computing world with the “Little Green500″ list and opening its doors to innovation with two new exploratory lists: the”‘Open Green500” and “HPCC Green500.”

Most of our readers will know that the canonical Green500 list ranks systems on the Top500 list by energy efficiency.

The more-inclusive “Little Green500” list will broaden the definition of a supercomputer to include any machine used for commodity supercomputing that could have made the TOP500 within the past 18 months.

And the two new lists are aimed at getting people to think more broadly about both architecture and measurement

Two new exploratory lists also are now open for submissions. The Open Green500 will allow supercomputers to use a combination of single-precision and double-precision to generate a correct double-precision result for LINPACK. “We hope that this will stimulate innovation by allowing hardware manufacturers to explore novel architectural solutions while numerical analysts compose novel algorithms to perhaps create a synergistic multi-grid method for LINPACK,” Feng said. Similarly, the second exploratory list will use the High Performance Computing Challenge (HPCC) benchmark for its performance results.

More in the release.