IBM dominates the list of top 20 green supercomputers

IBM has dominated the list of the greenest supercomputers in the world, taking the number one spot as well as 18 of the top 20 machines.

An IBM supercomputer based in Poland won out as the world's most energy efficient supercomputer, according to the latest list of 500 announced by Green500.org.

Using IBM Bladecentre Q22 architecture and based at the University of Warsaw, it is most the energy efficient supercomputer in the world, producing more than 536 MFlops per watt of energy. However, it is only the 422nd on the list of top 500 supercomputers.

The most powerful supercomputer in the top 500 turned out to be the fourth most energy efficient. The IBM supercomputer Roadrunner, based at Los Alamos National Labs and which has already broken through the petaflop barrier, hit 444 MFlops per watt of energy.

According to Green500.org, average efficiency had increased by 10 per cent, even though the supercomputers were consuming more power than ever before.

The highest non-IBM supercomputer in the green supercomputer list was the GRAPE-DR at number five, a self-made accelerator-based machine based at the University of Tokyo. IBM vice president of deep computing at IBM David Turek said in a statement: "Modern supercomputers can no longer focus only on raw performance. To be commercially viable these systems must also be energy efficient."