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NVIDIA's Tesla GPU powers Tsubame 2.0 to green supercomputer supremacy
The Green500 might not be quite as well known as the Top500, but it's no less of an honor to be counted among the world's most energy efficient supercomputers. NVIDIA is tooting its own horn for making it on to the list for the second year in a row as part of the "greenest" petaflop machine. The Tsubame 2.0 at the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Global Scientific Information Center is powered by Intel's Xeon CPUs, but NVIDIA's Tesla general purpose GPUs do a vast majority of the number crunching, allowing it to deliver 1.19 petaflops of performance while consuming only 1.2 megawatts. That's roughly 958 megaflops per watt, a huge increase over the most efficient CPU-only super computer, the Cielo Cray, which gets only 278 megaflops per watt. The Tsubame 2.0 isn't the greenest machine on the planet though, that honor belongs to IBM's BlueGene which takes the top five spots on the Green500. Still, number ten ain't bad... right? Check out the PR after the break.
Tokyo University's Grape-DR supercomputer is a tangled green powerhouse
We live in an ecologically minded era, where Ford spends more time talking up the new Mustang's mpg rating than its 0 - 60 times. Appropriate, then, that supercomputers are now being rated not on ultimate speed but on speed relative to power consumption. Top of the Green500 supercomputer list is the Grape-DR, a Japanese cluster at the University of Tokyo powered by a combination of 128 Intel Core i7-920 processors and four bespoke accelerator chips. That combination enables the system to manage 815.43 megaflops per watt, a good bit higher than the 773.38 rating an IBM-based machine in Germany managed. That's quite a bit lower than the team hopes to achieve, indicating they can boost that rating by 50 percent by the end of the year. Hopefully by then they invest in some cable management. Two of our staff network engineers passed out after just glancing at the picture above. The third... well, he didn't fare so well.
