Shoubu Supercomputer in Japan Repeats as the Most Energy-Efficient on Green500 List;
China Lands Six Supercomputers in Top 10
Austin, TX, USA; November 18, 2015 – The Shoubu supercomputer from RIKEN maintained the top spot on the 18th edition of the twice-yearly Green500 List and claimed the title of the “most energy-efficient (or greenest) supercomputer in the world.” The Shoubu supercomputer, which surpassed the seven gigaflops/watt (billions of operations per second per watt) milestone this past July, also remains as the only supercomputer that has surpassed that mark. The TSUBAME-KFC/DL supercomputer from the GSIC Center at Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan and the Lattice-CSC supercomputer from GSI Helmholtz Center in Germany grabbed second and third place, respectively, with both machines surpassing five gigaflops/watt.
The top-ranked Shoubu supercomputer at RIKEN is a heterogeneous one; that is, it is a supercomputer with two or more different types of “silicon brains.” Specifically, the Shoubu supercomputer consists of (1) Haswell CPU processors from Intel and (2) new many-core accelerators from PEZY-SC, coupled with an energy-efficient software design. At number two and three are the TSUBAME-KFC/DL supercomputer and Lattice-CSC supercomputer, respectively, both of which are also heterogeneous. TSUBAME-KFC/DL and Lattice-CSC both contain Intel Ivy Bridge CPU processors, but coupled with NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPUs and AMD Firepro S9150 GPUs as accelerators, respectively. Overall, heterogeneous accelerator-based systems continue to dominate the top places of the Green500. In the July 2015 edition of the list, the top 32 supercomputers on the Green500 List used accelerators; whereas in this edition of the list, the top 40 supercomputers used accelerators of one form or another, a nearly 25% increase in such systems at the top of the Green500.
Of particular note to this 18th edition of the Green500, China landed six supercomputers in the top ten of the Green500 list. These six supercomputers all employed Intel CPU processors and NVIDIA Kepler GPU processors. In the United States, the greenest supercomputer was XStream from the Stanford Research Computing Center, placing fifth on the list.
Listed below are the November 2015 The Green500's energy-efficient supercomputers ranked from 1 to 10. For more information about the sites and systems in the list, click on the links or view the complete list.
| Green500 Rank | MFlops/watts | Site | System | Total Power(kW) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 7031.4 | Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) | ExaScaler-1.4 80Brick, Xeon E5-2618Lv3 8C 2.3GHz, Infiniband FDR, PEZY-SC | 50.3 |
| 2 | 5331.5 | GSIC Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology | LX 1U-4GPU/104Re-1G Cluster, Intel Xeon E5-2620v2 6C 2.1GHz, Infiniband FDR, NVIDIA Tesla K80 | 51.1 |
| 3 | 5272.1 | GSI Helmholtz Center | ASUS ESC4000 FDR/G2S, Intel Xeon E5-2690v2 10C 3GHz, Infiniband FDR, AMD FirePro S9150 | 57.2 |
| 4 | 4778.5 | Institute of Modern Physics (IMP), Chinese Academy of Sciences | Sugon Cluster W780I, Xeon E5-2640v3 8C 2.6GHz, Infiniband QDR, NVIDIA Tesla K80 | 65 |
| 5 | 4112.1 | Stanford Research Computing Center | Cray CS-Storm, Intel Xeon E5-2680v2 10C 2.8GHz, Infiniband FDR, Nvidia K80 | 190 |
| 6 | 3856.9 | IT Company | Inspur TS10000 HPC Server, Xeon E5-2620v3 6C 2.4GHz, 10G Ethernet, NVIDIA Tesla K40 | 58 |
| 7 | 3775.5 | Internet Service | Inspur TS10000 HPC Server, Intel Xeon E5-2620v2 6C 2.1GHz, 10G Ethernet, NVIDIA Tesla K40 | 110 |
| 8 | 3775.5 | Internet Service | Inspur TS10000 HPC Server, Intel Xeon E5-2620v2 6C 2.1GHz, 10G Ethernet, NVIDIA Tesla K40 | 110 |
| 9 | 3775.5 | Internet Service | Inspur TS10000 HPC Server, Intel Xeon E5-2620v2 6C 2.1GHz, 10G Ethernet, NVIDIA Tesla K40 | 110 |
| 10 | 3775.5 | Internet Service | Inspur TS10000 HPC Server, Intel Xeon E5-2620v2 6C 2.1GHz, 10G Ethernet, NVIDIA Tesla K40 | 110 |