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November 20, 2008

Report Finds IBM Supercomputers Most Energy Efficient

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IBM dominates Green500; Top 20 energy efficient supercomputers made by IBM, also accounts for 78 percent of Top 50

ARMONK, N.Y., Nov. 20 -- A new report, announced today, found that IBM supercomputers already deemed the most powerful in the world are also the most energy efficient according to the findings of the latest Supercomputing "Green 500 List" announced by The Green500.org.

The report found that the top 20 most energy efficient supercomputers in the world are built on IBM high performance computing technology. The list includes supercomputers from across the globe being used for a variety of applications such as astronomy, climate prediction and pharmaceutical research. IBM also holds 39 of the top 50 positions on this list.

The number one most energy efficient system in the world -- an IBM supercomputer based on QS22 Blade servers at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling, University of Warsaw -- produces more than 536 Mflops (millions of floating point operations per second) per watt of energy.

By comparison, the first non IBM entry on the list offers about half the performance -- 240 Mflops per watt -- than IBM's number one system. The most energy efficient system from HP offers less than half the performance -- 217 Mflops per watt -- than the top IBM system.

The recently announced world's fastest supercomputer in the world, the IBM petaflop supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratories, is ranked at number nine in energy efficiency, while the second most powerful supercomputer in the world, manufactured by Cray, is ranked 80th on the list, producing only 153 Mflops per watts.

"Modern supercomputers can no long focus only on raw performance," said David Turek, vice president of deep computing at IBM. "To be commercially viable these systems most also be energy efficient. IBM has a rich history of innovation that has significantly increased microprocessor energy efficiency. We have also driven advances that include our Cool Blue technology portfolio and added to our Project Big Green solutions that are designed to simultaneously reduce data center costs and energy use."

The average energy efficiency of all IBM systems on the Green500 list is 135.58 Mflops per watt -- significantly higher than the 76.34 megaflops per watt average of non-IBM systems and more than double that of HP, who's total systems energy efficiency average is 57.22 megaflops per watt.

The Green 500 list is published by The Green500.org. It provides a ranking of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world and serves as a complementary view to the TOP500 list of worldwide supercomputers announced earlier this week by TOP500.org.

More information about the Green500 List available at: http://www.green500.org/lists/2008/11/green500.php.

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