Green500 lists the fastest 500 computers in the world and analyses them and ranks them based on their efficiency and performance per watts. This is where IBM dominates all other tech companies.

The number one supercomputer is the company’s Roadrunner system which is stationed at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory; however, this supercomputer only ranks fourth in the list of green computers whose frontrunners are still owned by IBM.

Green computers are measured in MFLops per watt where “1 MFlop” is equivalent to 1 million floating point operations per second.

The greenest computer is occupied by IBM’s BladeCenter cluster which is stationed at the University of Warsaw. This greenest supercomputer produced 536 MFlops for each watt of energy used.

Next to the BladeCenter are still IBM computers which is stationed at the Department of Energy and at IBM’s Poughkeepsie Benchmarking Center.

Of the top 100 greenest computers, IBM owns 57 of them and the highest non-IBM green supercomputer is stationed at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and is named “Greatly Reduced Array of Processor Elements with Data Reduction (GRAPE-DR)”. Other vendors that made the list other than IBM are supercomputers from NEC where their highest ranked supercomputer is at number 20. NEC’s supercomputer uses Intel Xeon processors and is deployed at the University of Struttgart.

The average efficiency of these supercomputers is 108 MFlops per watt while the aggregate power was around 200 to 230 megawatts.

IBM may have sold their personal computer business which seemed like they have focused on their supercomputer production and now their dominance is not challenged by anyone. They would likely remain dominant on this market for decades to come.

Image from IBM.

Post from: EveryJoe

IBM is the Greenest on Supercomputers