SC10 -- The "Green500" list of the world's most energy-efficient supercomputers was released today, revealing that the only petaflop systems in the top 10 are powered by NVIDIA(R) Tesla(TM) GPUs.
Of these GPU-powered petaflop systems, Tsubame 2.0, from Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), was ranked number two; and Tianhe-1A, the world's fastest supercomputer from National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, was ranked number 10.
"The rise of GPU supercomputers on the Green500 signifies that heterogeneous systems, built with both GPUs and CPUs, deliver the highest performance and unprecedented energy efficiency," said Wu-chun Feng, founder of the Green500 and associate professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech.
GPUs have quickly become the enabling technology behind the world's top supercomputers. They contain hundreds of parallel processor cores capable of dividing up large computational workloads and processing them simultaneously. This significantly increases overall system efficiency as measured by performance per watt. "Top500" supercomputers based on heterogeneous architectures are, on average, almost three times more power-efficient than non-heterogeneous systems.
Two other Tesla GPU-based systems made the Top 10 and Tesla GPU-based systems installed at CSIRO in Australia and National Supercomputer Center in Shenzhen were also ranked 11 and 12 respectively.
NVIDIA touts greenness of Tesla-based supercomputers
Posted on Friday, November 19 2010 @ 3:25 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck