IBM Supercomputers Crowned as Most Energy Efficient in the World

In today's highly environmentally conscious world it isn't enough for supercomputers to be extremely powerful, they also have to be green, so IBM has certainly reasons to brag about their high performance computers being crowned as the most energy efficient in the world, according to the latest Supercomputing 'Green500 List.'

Announced every year by the Green500.org, this list is made up of the most energy efficient supercomputers in the world, a prototype of IBM's next generation Blue Gene supercomputer coming as the most energy efficient HPC solution available.

Moving on in the list, we can also see that 15 of the top 25 most energy efficient supercomputers in the world are also built using IBM's HPC computing technology, the list including computers from China to Germany s well as the United States that are being used for a variety of tasks.

Scheduled to be deployed in 2012 by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, the next generation Blue Gene supercomputer will consist of about 50,000 compute nodes, with 16 cores per node, 70PB of disk space and will be water cooled.

Although its performance can't yet be estimated, a single midplane of this supercomputer, consisting of 8192 cores, made it to the 115 place in the November 2010 Top 500 list, proving it can deliver more than 100 teraflops peak performance and LINPACK performance of 65 teraflops.

"As a research and development laboratory, we depend on large high performance computing systems to fulfill our national security missions," said Dona Crawford, associate director for Computation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

"By reducing energy costs, we are able to make high performance computing (HPC) resources available to more researchers and their collaborators, advancing both science and the computing applications that make it possible."