The Green Lists
The inaugural Green500 list was announced on November 15, 2008 at SC|08. As a complement to the TOP500, the unveiling of the Green500 ushered in a new era where supercomputers can be compared by performance-per-watt.
While the selection of any power-performance metric will be controversial, we currently opt for "FLOPS-per-Watt" given that it has already become a widely used metric in the community and for reasons outlined in, Making a Case for a Green500 List, which was presented at the 2nd IEEE IPDPS Workshop on High-Performance, Power-Aware Computing, April 2006.
At SC|09, the Green500 announced the creation of three new lists -- Little, Open, and HPCC -- as companions to the Green500 list. While the Green500 list will continue to be the official rankings, these new lists allow us to explore new metrics based on community input.
The Green500 List
The Green500 list, ranks the top 500 supercomputers in the world by energy efficiency. The focus of performance-at-any-cost computer operations has led to the emergence of supercomputers that consume vast amounts of electrical power and produce so much heat that large cooling facilities must be constructed to ensure proper performance. To address this trend, the Green500 list puts a premium on energy-efficient performance for sustainable supercomputing.
Exploratory Lists
Little Green500
Noting that there are more than 500 supercomputers worldwide, the Little Green500 list broadens the definition of a supercomputer to help guide purchasing decisions for smaller institutions. To be eligible for the Little Green500, a supercomputer must be as "fast" as the 500th ranked supercomputer on the TOP500 list 18-months prior to the release of the Little Green500.
Open Green500
The Open Green500 is an exploratory list that allows mixed-precision algorithms and novel hardware to compete. Our hope is that this will stimulate innovation by allowing hardware manufacturers to explore novel architectural solutions while numerical analysts compose novel algorithms to perhaps create a "synergistic multigrid method for LINPACK."
- June 2010 (open for submissions)
HPCC Green500
In response to suggestions about alternative benchmark suites, the HPCC Green500 is another exploratory list. This list will allow users to measure energy-efficient performance using the High Performance Computing Challenge (HPCC) benchmark suite.
- June 2010 (open for submissions)
Submit your computer Have your own green supercomputer that should be on our rankings?
