Many of the world’s most powerful supercomputers are run on technology developed by IBM. And according to the latest Green500 List, they are also the most energy efficient.
Supercomputers like the one IBM built at the Los Alamos National Laboratories – the world’s fastest – are used for high-powered calculations, modeling of subatomic particles or simulating complex climate patterns.
The immense power of supercomputers requires a lot of energy. According to Green500.org, the nonprofit group that releases the list three times a year, supercomputers produce so much heat that extravagant cooling facilities must be constructed to ensure proper operation.
IBM’s technological breakthroughs have greatly improved the energy efficiency of supercomputers, which is why so many of the 500 greenest supercomputers on the current list are built by IBM.
The list shows that 18 of the 20 and 57 of the top 100 most energy efficient supercomputers in the world are built on IBM high performance computing technology.
An IBM supercomputer at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modeling, at the University of Warsaw is currently the most energy efficient in the world. It produces more than 536 Mflops (millions of floating point operations per second) per watt of energy.
"Modern supercomputers can no longer focus only on raw performance," said David Turek, vice president of deep computing at IBM. "To be commercially viable these systems most also be energy efficient."
IBM also deploys its technologies for data centers – the massive servers that make the internet possible and store trillions of web pages.
Along with Syracuse University and New York state, IBM is working to build and operate a new computer data center on the university’s campus that will be one of the most energy-efficient in the world.