JUL 13

It's fascinating to consider "Supercomputers" under the green umbrella...And yet, it's very clear how important it is to make advances in this ever-evolving industry. Thanks for the post. Here's to a more sustainable, energy-efficient future!

Best,
Member of the Granite Green Team
Greenerpalooza NH
http://Facebook.com/GreenNH

What is fascinating is to call "supercomputer" a cluster of 128 processors.

I think it's great to consider power in measuring supercomputers. FYI, the top 500 most power efficient supercomputers are listed at http://www.green500.org/ with more details at http://www.top500.org/. While one might consider the 500 cores in the Grape-DR small compared to the 224K cores in the first place supercomputer, what is interesting is comparing the first (1.76Pf) vs second (1.27Pf) place supercomputer, and average across the top 500. While the Oak Ridge Cray XT5 was fastest in 2010, it was 253 Mf/W vs 493 Mf/W for the Japanese Dawning (Intel) machine in second place. The 2010 winner was the IBM QPACE system at 773Mf/W (rank 131/500), much better than the average top 10 of 300 Mf/W. (The average power is 2.89 MW!)

We don't have Mf/$ figures, but often the cost is purchase price, not including cost of running the machine for 5-10 years 24x7 at full capacity (and power). Add air conditioning and UPS backup power to electricity costs, and the 3MW computer can be really expensive to run.

This carries over to web servers which could be measured in web-pages/Joule. (A joule is a watt-second.)