The Green Brick Road to Exascale

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In a guest post on the ISC blog, Beth Sharp and Dr Tom Wilkie of Scientific Computing World write that the price of energy will dominate the future of HPC.

Ultimately though, it is on the road to exascale that the price of energy will dominate the future of HPC. And again, this is where energy efficiency will turn out to be a benefit rather than a cost to the community. The best performer in the November 2011 Green500 list was the IBM BlueGene/Q machine at the University of Rochester in the USA with a tally of just over 2000 Mflops/Watt. It is not the fastest machine in the world, coming in at place 29 on the Top500 list. But a straightforward extrapolation of its technology would indicate a power demand of 500 MW at exascale.

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