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Growing Greenness in the Grassroots Green500

June 30, 2011 – The latest release of The Green500 List points to a rapidly increasing pace of greenness on the Green500 List. Of the ten greenest supercomputers in the world, two trends towards greener supercomputing have emerged: (1) aggregating many low-power processors a la IBM BlueGene/Q and the K Computer by Fujitsu at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science and (2) using energy-efficient accelerators, typically from the gaming/graphics market, e.g., AMD Radeon GPU, NVIDIA Tesla Fermi GPU, Cell, and Intel Knights Corner, to complement the commodity CPUs from Intel and AMD.

The Green500 has ranked the energy efficiency of the world‟s 500 fastest supercomputers since its debut in 2007, serving as a complement to the well-known supercomputer industry marker TOP500. Green500 founder Wu Feng notes that “The Green500 seeks to raise awareness in the energy efficiency of supercomputing, and in turn, drive energy efficiency as a first-order design constraint – one that is on par with performance or speed.” To measure this energy efficiency, the Green500 uses a metric defined as „millions of floating-point operations per second‟ (MFLOPS) divided by „watts‟ (W) or MFLOPS/W.

Wu-chun Feng and Kirk Cameron

The updated run rules for the Green500 and Little Green500 list will be available on the website starting October 20th. The updated run rules can be found here. At the same time the submission portal for the November 2010 list will open.

May 04, 2010 by insiderHPC

In the inaugural episode of the Green HPC podcast series we will examine the issues that datacenter managers and system designers are facing with high performance computing systems of all sizes today. Even if you aren’t “green at heart,” there are very practical and compelling reasons why a growing awareness of energy use in your datacenter — how much, where it goes, and what it costs you — is critical to your success.

by Steven Mackay

The sixth edition of the Green500 List shows a continuing improvement in energy efficiency among the world's fastest supercomputers. Three IBM QPACE (quantum chromodynamics parallel computing on the Cell) top the latest Green500 list, all tying for first place and all are located in Germany: Jülich Research Center, University of Regensburg, and University of Wuppertal.

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Nov 23, 2009 by Greg Kline

Purdue University's student Cluster Challenge team at the SC09 supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore., was fast and green. The Purdue team in the competition, where teams of undergraduates from around the country pushed their student-run supercomputers to the maximum over three days, won the award for getting the most done on the least amount of power, organizers announced Thursday (Nov. 19). Purdue also won the power consumption award last year.

http://news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2009b/091123EvansChallenge.html

The Green500

Nov 05, 2009

The Green500 is getting a refresh. Since its 2007 debut, the Green500 has ranked only the energy efficiency of the world's 500 fastest performing supercomputers. Now, the Green500 is expanding the definition of a supercomputer to include a wider spectrum of the high-end computing world with the 'Little Green500' list and opening its doors to innovation with two new exploratory lists: the 'Open Green500' and 'HPCC Green500.'

The Green500

Nov 16, 2008

On Wednesday, November 19, at SC|08, the founders of the Green500 from Virginia Tech will host a Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session, centered around evolving the list to better serve the high-performance computing community. Being "green" has undergone a true revolution -- from being largely scoffed at in the early 2000s to being so important that being "green" has become a necessity rather than a luxury.

The inaugural Green500 was announced on November 15, 2007 at SC|07 with the most recent list announced on June 30, 2008. As a complement to the TOP500, the unveiling of the Green500 ushered in a new era where supercomputers can be compared by performance-per-watt.

This 3rd edition of the Green500 contains a plethora of interesting takeaways, of which the following five are most notable.