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Green500 Turns Blue


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IBM Blue Gene/Q

The IBM Blue Gene/Q dominated the Green500 list in commanding fashion.

Credit: DatacenterDynamics

The 20 most energy efficient supercomputers are all IBM Blue Gene/Q systems, according to the most recent Green500 rankings. Each of the top 20 systems delivered more than 2,000 megaflops/watt, which is twice as efficient as the average for the next 20 supercomputers on the list.

The latest rankings show that a high graphics-processing unit to central-processing unit (CPU) ratio tends to yield more megaflops per watt than a lower ratio. The rankings also show that accelerator-based systems result in below average Linpack performances compared to the machine's peak performance.

Several x86 CPU-only systems did well in the latest rankings, including the new 2.9 petaflop SuperMUC system, which is housed as Germany's Leibniz Supercomputing Center. SuperMUC uses a hot-water cooling system that saves energy, and whose waste heat is repurposed for local use at the facility. The top-ranked system, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sequoia, delivers 20 peak petaflops and draws 7.9 megawatts when it is running floating-point heavy codes such as Linpack.

From HPC Wire
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Abstracts Copyright © 2012 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA


 

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