Blacksburg, VA, USA; July 31, 2015 – The Shoubu supercomputer from RIKEN earned the top spot on the 17th edition of the twice-yearly Green500 List to claim the title of the “most energy-efficient (or greenest) supercomputer in the world.” The Shoubu supercomputer became the first and only supercomputer on the list to surpass seven gigaflops/watt (billions of operations per second per watt) milestone. This edition of the list also saw the first three supercomputers on the list -- Shoubu at #1, Suiren Blue at #2, and Suiren at #3 -- surpass the six gigaflops/watt mark.
The #1 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 Haswell CPUs from Intel, new many-core accelerators from PEZY-SC, and an energy-efficient software design. The #2 Suiren Blue supercomputer at KEK is similarly equipped while the #3 Suiren supercomputer uses Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs instead of the Haswell CPUs. All three of these heterogeneous supercomputers were manufactured by PEZY Computing / Exascaler Inc.
Overall, heterogeneous accelerator-based systems continue to dominate the top places of the Green500. In the November 2014 edition of the list, the top 23 supercomputers on the Green500 List used accelerators; whereas with this edition of the list, the top 32 supercomputers made use of accelerators, a nearly 40% increase in such systems at the top of the Green500. Across both editions of the list, the accelerators come from four vendors (in alphabetical order): AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and PEZY-SC.
Similar to Japan’s penchant for building fuel-efficient automobiles, dating as far back as the late 1960s, Japan also appears to be leading the charge in creating energy-efficient (or green) supercomputers. Of the top 20 most energy-efficient supercomputers on this edition of the Green500, eight come from Japan. No other country in the world has more than three in the top 20.
With President Barack Obama’s recent announcement to create a National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI), will the future of supercomputing mirror what happened in the auto industry? Or will this initiative acknowledge and support the critical role that supercomputing (or high-performance computing) plays in today’s modern technological society and do so while spurring innovation in energy-efficient supercomputing?
Listed below are the June 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 | RIKEN | ExaScaler-1.4 80Brick, Xeon E5-2618Lv3 8C 2.3GHz, Infiniband FDR, PEZY-SC | 50.3 |
| 2 | 6841.3 | High Energy Accelerator Research Organization /KEK | ExaScaler-1.4 16Brick, Xeon E5-2618Lv3 8C 2.3GHz, Infiniband, PEZY-SC | 28.3 |
| 3 | 6217.9 | High Energy Accelerator Research Organization /KEK | ExaScaler 32U256SC Cluster, Intel Xeon E5-2660v2 10C 2.2GHz, Infiniband FDR, PEZY-SC | 32.6 |
| 4 | 5272.1 | GSI Helmholtz Center | ASUS ESC4000 FDR/G2S, Intel Xeon E5-2690v2 10C 3GHz, Infiniband FDR, AMD FirePro S9150 | 57.2 |
| 5 | 4258.1 | GSIC Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology | LX 1U-4GPU/104Re-1G Cluster, Intel Xeon E5-2620v2 6C 2.100GHz, Infiniband FDR, NVIDIA K20x | 39.8 |
| 6 | 4112.1 | Stanford Research Computing Center | Cray CS-Storm, Intel Xeon E5-2680v2 10C 2.8GHz, Infiniband FDR, Nvidia K80 | 190 |
| 7 | 3962.7 | Cray Inc. | Cray CS-Storm, Intel Xeon E5-2660v2 10C 2.2GHz, Infiniband FDR, Nvidia K40m | 44.5 |
| 8 | 3631.7 | Cambridge University | Dell T620 Cluster, Intel Xeon E5-2630v2 6C 2.600GHz, Infiniband FDR, NVIDIA K20 | 52.6 |
| 9 | 3614.9 | TU Dresden, ZIH | Bull bullx R400, Xeon E5-2680v3 12C 2.5GHz, Infiniband FDR, Nvidia K80 | 58.0 |
| 10 | 3543.3 | Financial Institution | iDataPlex DX360M4, Intel Xeon E5-2680v2 10C 2.800GHz, Infiniband, NVIDIA K20x | 54.6 |