Chinese machine is fast, but not clean like IBM’s Gene

There’s more than one way to measure the might of a supercomputer, and IBM has to like it when the measuring tape is green.

IDG News reported Thursday that Blue Gene/Q, the next-generation prototype of IBM’s Blue Gene machines, topped the latest iteration of the Green500 list that ranks supercomputers by their power efficiency.

The standings came out at the SC2010 conference in New Orleans.

Blue Gene/Q is 165 percent more efficient than the Chinese supercomputer, Tianhe-1A, that topped the pure processing power list released Sunday. It is 77 percent more power-efficient than the number-two entry on the Green500 list, the Tokyo Institute of Technology’s Tsubame 2.0, IDG said.

Blue Gene/Q performed 1,684 megaflops per watt. Tsubame 2.0 scored 948 megaflops per watt, and the EcoG system from the U.S. National Science Foundation’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications was third with 933 megaflops per watt.

Tianhe-1A’s 2.57 petaflops. However, Tianhe-1A only demonstrated an efficiency of 635 megaflops per watt, and placed tenth, IDG noted.

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