Nvidia Tesla GPUs Power World’s Greenest Supercomputer

Nvidia has just announced that for the second year in a row, the Tsubame 2.0 system powered by Nvidia Tesla GPUs has become the most energy efficient petaflop-class supercomputer in the world according to the TOP500 list.

Tsubame 2.0 is a heterogeneous supercomputer (combining both CPUs and GPUs) used to accelerate a range of scientific and industrial research in Japan.

This is installed at Tokyo Institute of Technology’s Global Scientific Information Center (GSIC) and went live in 2010.

According to Nvidia, the supercomputer has a sustained performance of 1.19 petaflops per second while consuming 1.2 megawatts of power, which after a simple calculation reveals that it can deliver 958 megaflops of processing power per watt of energy.

This makes it 3.4-times more energy efficient than its closes rival, the Cray built Cielo supercomputer installed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), which delivers 278 megaflops per watt.

The Tsubame 2.0 is comprised of HP ProLiant SL390 servers with 1,400 compute nodes based on Intel’s six-core Xeon 5600-series CPUs accelerated by no less than 4,200 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs. These Nvidia Tesla accelerators deliver more than 80 percent of the supercomputer’s performance.

The Nvidia-powered Tsubame 2.0 supercomputer isn’t the only system to retain its position in this newest edition of the TOP500 list as the Japanese "K Computer” also managed to hang on to its number one spot in this list, a first for the TOP500 organization.

The supercomputer has just recently reached its final configuration which is comprised of 864 racks including a total of 88,128 interconnected CPUs making it able to deliver 10.51 petaflops in the LINPACK benchmark used for calculating the power of HPC systems.

The Japanese-built K Computer is actually so powerful that its performance is four times greater than that of its nearest competitor, and about nine times more powerful than the Tsubame 2.0.