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 Twice-yearly TOP500 puts out a list of the world's fastest supercomputers. This is a closely watched event in the world of high performance computing, with inclusion in the list having become a highly sought after prize.
For decades now, the notion of ‘performance’ has been synonymous with ‘speed’ (as measured in FLOPS, short for floating-point operations per second). What this has led to is the emergence of supercomputers that consume egregious amounts of electrical power and produce so much heat that extravagant cooling facilities must be constructed to ensure proper operation. As a consequence, there has been an extraordinary increase in the total cost of ownership of a supercomputer, with costs running as high as US$1m to US$4m per year to operate a mega system.
To raise awareness to other performance metrics of interest, e.g. performance per watt and energy efficiency for improved reliability, Kirk Cameron and Wu Feng, associate professors at Virginia Tech's computer science department, have proposed an alternative list – the Green500 List. Cameron and Feng argue that the TOP500 list makes it much more difficult for the high-end computing community to focus on performance metrics other than speed.
The inaugural Green500 List was announced on November 15, 2007 and hopes to usher in a new era where supercomputers can be compared by performance-per-watt. The top of the list is completely dominated by IBM's Blue Gene supercomputers, with 26 of the top 27 deployments.
Caroline Roberts, deep computer sales manager in the UK at IBM, said that energy efficiency was a key design feature of the Blue Gene architecture.
"Since IBM sold the first Blue Gene supercomputer in 2004, it has come along in leaps and bounds," she said.
Roberts explained that using a large number of relatively low powered CPUs (850MHz compared to 2GHz used in most other supercomputers) meant that the Blue Gene machines are "sipping electricity but still producing massive computational power".
Roberts concluded that "floppage-per-watt" will become an increasingly important metric for supercomputer deployments as the pressure of green issues and costs of powering these systems continues to increase.
You can check out the full list at the Green500 website.
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