Sign up for our newsletter and get the latest big data news and analysis.
Daily
Weekly

IBM, accelerators dominate Green500

The latest Green500 list was released at the end of June, and once again IBM dominates the list with a range of platforms.

IBM is in 17 of the top 20 slots, and 65 of the top 100, with Cell, iDataPlex, and Blue Gene. The number 1 system on the list, an IBM at Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ), is ranked with 773.38 MFLOPS/W, and shows up at #5 on the Top500 list. For comparison, the number one on the Top500 (ORNL’s Cray Jaguar system) is 56 on the Green500 with only 253 MFLOPS/W. Which just goes to show that it’s all about what you measure.

As the Green500 web site points out, 8 of the top 10 systems are accelerator-based (6 use Cell, and 2 use NVIDIA GPUs).

Green500 list logoGreen500 co-founder Wu Feng, associate professor of computer science and electrical & computer engineering at the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech explained the significance of the ‘fuel efficiency’ of these accelerator-based supercomputers. “The accelerator-based supercomputers on The Green500 List produce an average efficiency of 554 MFLOPS/W whereas the other measured supercomputers on the list produce an average efficiency of 181 MFLOPS/W. That makes the accelerator-based supercomputers on the Green500 more than three times more energy efficient than their non-accelerated counterparts on the list” Feng said.

The most efficient x86-only cluster in the world is from my alma mater, Mississippi State University. Go dawgs!

Resource Links: