The Green500 List - June 2011
The Green500 List continues to highlight the rapid growth in efficiency of the largest supercomputers in the world and to drive energy efficiency in high-performance computing. After last year’s "Year; of the Accelerator" the trend continues with 14 of the top 20 computers using either Cell or GPU accelerators. However, the trend of aggregating many low-power processors currently tops the Green500 with two versions of IBM Blue Gene/Q prototype supercomputers. In addition, the current fastest supercomputer in the world, the K computer, also uses this approach. For more details, please take a look at our press release.
Aggregating Many Low-Power Processors
Not just one, but two IBM Blue Gene/Q prototypes top this edition of the Green500. However, the Blue Gene/Q prototype at #1 on this list is different from the one that topped the last edition of the list in that it delivers significantly better performance with the same number of cores and only a marginal increase in power consumption. The end result is a MFLOPS/W rating of 2,097, the first supercomputer to surpass 2,000 MFLOPS/W. The fastest supercomputer in the world, the K supercomputer from RIKEN in Japan, also aggregates many low-power processors and is one of the greenest supercomputers in the world, coming in at #6 on the Green500. The other major advantage to this approach is the amazing performance efficiency achieved by these machines. Specifically 81.9% efficiency for Blue Gene/Q and 93% for K, far greater than the average of 67.7% achieved by the other machines on the list and even farther from the average of 47% achieved by GPU-accelerated machines.
Energy-Efficient Accelerators
The greenest accelerator-based supercomputer in the world is the DEGIMA Cluster, a self-built supercomputer from Nagasaki University in Japan. The DEGIMA Cluster is accelerated by AMD/ATI Radeon graphics processing units (GPUs) on a thrifty supercomputing budget of NZ$600,000 or approximately US$500,000. Six other accelerator-based machines round out the ten greenest supercomputers in the world - three with GPU accelerators (one more from AMD/ATI and two from NVIDIA) and three with IBM Cell-based accelerators.
Overall Highlights
- The average efficiency of measured systems on the Green500 has increased from 230 MFLOPS/W to 256 MFLOPS/W, an improvement of 11%.
- The efficiency of accelerator-based systems on the Green500 has improved 23% from 573 MFLOPS/W to 707 MFLOPS/W.
- 70% of the 20 greenest supercomputers are accelerator-based.
Listed below are the The Green500's Top 10 most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world as of June 2011.
| Green500 Rank | MFLOPS/W | Site* | Computer* | Total Power (kW) |
| 1 | 2097.19 | IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center | NNSA/SC Blue Gene/Q Prototype 2 | 40.95 |
| 2 | 1684.20 | IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center | NNSA/SC Blue Gene/Q Prototype 1 | 38.80 |
| 3 | 1375.88 | Nagasaki University | DEGIMA Cluster, Intel i5, ATI Radeon GPU, Infiniband QDR | 34.24 |
| 4 | 958.35 | GSIC Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology | HP ProLiant SL390s G7 Xeon 6C X5670, Nvidia GPU, Linux/Windows | 1243.80 |
| 5 | 891.88 | CINECA / SCS - SuperComputing Solution | iDataPlex DX360M3, Xeon 2.4, nVidia GPU, Infiniband | 160.00 |
| 6 | 824.56 | RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) | K computer, SPARC64 VIIIfx 2.0GHz, Tofu interconnect | 9898.56 |
| 7 | 773.38 | Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) | QPACE SFB TR Cluster, PowerXCell 8i, 3.2 GHz, 3D-Torus | 57.54 |
| 8 | 773.38 | Universitaet Regensburg | QPACE SFB TR Cluster, PowerXCell 8i, 3.2 GHz, 3D-Torus | 57.54 |
| 9 | 773.38 | Universitaet Wuppertal | QPACE SFB TR Cluster, PowerXCell 8i, 3.2 GHz, 3D-Torus | 57.54 |
| 10 | 718.13 | Universitaet Frankfurt | Supermicro Cluster, QC Opteron 2.1 GHz, ATI Radeon GPU, Infiniband | 416.78 |
* Performance data obtained from publicly available sources including TOP500