The Green500 List - June 2008

This 3rd edition of the Green500 contains a plethora of interesting takeaways,
of which the following five are most notable.

1. The first sustained petaflop supercomputer - Roadrunner,
   from DOE Los Alamos National Laboratory - exhibits extraordinary
   energy efficiency.
• Roadrunner, the top-ranked supercomputer in the TOP500,
  is ranked #3 on the Green500. This achievement further reinforces
  the fact that energy efficiency is as important as raw performance
  for modern supercomputers and that energy efficiency and performance
  can coexist. (For comparison, the last two supercomputers to top the
  TOP500 are #43 and #499 on the Green500.)
2. The top three supercomputers surpass the 400 MFLOPS/watt milestone
   for the first time.
• Three of IBM’s Cell-based QS22 supercomputers at IBM Germany,
  Fraunhofer ITWM, and DOE/NNSA/LANL achieved 488.14, 488.14, and 437.43 MFLOPS/watt,
  respectively.
3. Energy efficiency hits the mainstream.
• The energy efficiency of a commodity system based on Intel’s
  45-nm low-power quad-core Xeon is now on par with IBM BlueGene/L (BG/L)
  machines, which debuted in November 2004.
4. The FLOPS/watt distribution is still skewed from top to bottom but
   improving.
• While the energy efficiency of the top-ranked Green500 supercomputer
  has improved by almost 131,000,000 Flops/watt since November 2007, the bottom-ranked
  Green500 supercomputer has improved
  by only 390,000 Flops/watt. Overall, the MFLOPS/watt distribution of
  the Green500 is
  skewed with only 28% of the machines acheiving more than 100Mflops/watt
  (up from 14% last November).
5. Each of supercomputers in the top ten from this edition of the Green500
   has a higher FLOPS/watt rating than the previous #1 Green500 supercomputer.