Green500 Announces the World’s Most Efficient Supercomputers

The Green500 website has released its latest list of the worlds most energy-efficient supercomputers. Unlike the famous TOP500 list, which ranks the fastest computers by the number of operations per second, the Green500 list ranks systems by the number of operations per second per watt.

The Shobu supercomputer at RIKEN in Japan tops the latest Green500 list. According to the Green500 website, “The Shobu supercomputer became the first and only supercomputer on the list to surpass the seven gigaflops/watt milestone.”

The latest list also marks the continuing emergence of heterogeneous systems that include accelerators as well as conventional multicore CPUs. Accelerator-based heterogeneous systems hold the top 32 spots on the current list.

Power and heat are limiting factors that affect the design of all supercomputers. The super-efficient computers on the Green500 are not as speedy as the behemoth systems that top the TOP500, but the energy-saving techniques deployed with the Green500 systems might one day lead to higher capacity and faster operation for all supercomputers.