IBM still dominates green supercomputers

Bet you aren't surprised to hear that IBM technology provides the foundation for 15 of the 25 most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world, according to the latest Green500 list compiled by Green500.org. A prototype system for the next-Generation Blue Gene supercomputer shows up on top. Apparently, it is 77 percent more energy-efficient than the No. 2 system.

The list is compiled using a floating-point-operations-per-second-per watt measure.

The IBM computer at the top of this list will be in action by 2012 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Argonne National Laboratory. In fact, those laboratories, along with Columbia University and the University of Edinborough, contributed to the design. The fact is, the government and universities are just as interested in energy efficiency as the rest of us. So, even if you're reading this item thinking -- who the hell uses these things -- the work being done on these system will likely trickle down to more mainstream applications. And, they will make more scientific research possible, as comparative data sets continue to multiply.

Says Dona Crawford, associate director for Computation at Lawrence Livermore:

"As a research and development laboratory, we depend on large high performance computing systems to fulfill our national security missions. By reducing energy costs, we are able to make high performance computing resources available to more researchers and their collaborators, advancing both science and the computing applications that make it possible."