HPCwire: Report Finds IBM Supercomputers Most Energy Efficient

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July 13, 2009

Report Finds IBM Supercomputers Most Energy Efficient

IBM dominates Green500; 90 percent of Top20 energy efficient supercomputers made by IBM, Staggering 57 percent of Top100 from IBM

ARMONK, NY, July 13 -- A new list 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 "Green500 List" announced by Green500.org.

Energy efficiency -- including performance per watt for the most computationally demanding workloads -- is a core design principle in developing IBM systems. IBM offers the broadest range of generally applicable supercomputers represented on the Green500 List including Blue Gene, Power servers, iDataPlex, BladeCenter and hybrid clusters.

The list shows that 18 of the Top20 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 57 of the Top100 positions on this list.

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

The world's fastest supercomputer, the IBM supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratories, the machine that first broke through the petaflop barrier, is ranked the fourth most energy efficient supercomputer in the world capable of over 444 Mflops per watt of energy, while the second fastest supercomputer in the world manufactured by Cray is ranked 90th on the Green500 List, producing only 152 Mflops per watt.

"Modern supercomputers can no longer focus only on raw performance," said David Turek, vice president, deep computing, IBM. "To be commercially viable these systems most also be energy efficient. IBM has a rich history of innovation that has significantly increased energy efficiency of our systems at all levels of the system that are designed to simultaneously reduce data center costs and energy use."

The Green500 list is published by 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 last month by Top500.org.

More information about the Green500 List is available at http://www.green500.org

More information about the TOP500 List is available at http://www.top500.org

More information about IBM (NYSE: IBM) and HPC Solutions is available at www.ibm.com/deepcomputing.

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Source: IBM

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