The Green500 is a biannual ranking of supercomputers, from the TOP500 list of supercomputers, in terms of energy efficiency. [1] [2] The list measures performance per watt using the TOP500 measure of high performance LINPACK benchmarks at double-precision floating-point format.
The Green500 List was created by Kirk W. Cameron and Wu-chun Feng, then both associate professors in Computer Science at Virginia Tech, in 2006. The power measurement techniques that form the basis of the run rules were based on Cameron's early work in supercomputer energy efficiency initially funded by the National Science Foundation (Awards: #0347683, #0614705). The first Green500 List was presented at the 2007 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing and described in the December issue of IEEE Computer 40(12): 50-55 (2007).
The list was initially met with some controversy since several key stakeholders (e.g., SGI, DOE Laboratories) failed to submit measurements by the report deadlines and were deprecated in the original list using power estimates based on U/L Ratings. A revised list was posted in February of 2008 to enable those failing to submit to provide updates to the list. Successive, updated Green500 Lists followed independently twice per year, in June at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Europe and in November at the US-based ACM/IEEE Supercomputing conference. In 2014, the Green500 List merged with the Top500 List and now requires only a single submission to participate in both lists.
As of November 2012 [update] , an Appro International, Inc. Xtreme-X supercomputer (Beacon) topped the Green500 list with 2.499 LINPACK GFLOPS/W. [3] Beacon is deployed by NICS of the University of Tennessee and is a GreenBlade GB824M, Xeon E5-2670 based, eight cores (8C), 2.6 GHz, Infiniband FDR, Intel Xeon Phi 5110P computer. [4]
As of June 2013 [update] , the Eurotech supercomputer Eurora at Cineca topped the Green500 list with 3.208 LINPACK GFLOPS/W. [5] The Cineca Eurora supercomputer is equipped with two Intel Xeon E5-2687W CPUs and two PCI-e connected NVIDIA Tesla K20 accelerators per node. Water cooling and electronics design allows for very high densities to be reached with a peak performance of 350 TFLOPS per rack. [6]
As of November 2014 [update] , the L-CSC supercomputer of the Helmholtz Association at the GSI in Darmstadt Germany topped the Green500 list with 5.271 GFLOPS/W and was the first cluster to surpass an efficiency of 5 GFLOPS/W. It runs on Intel Xeon E5-2690 Processors with the Intel Ivy Bridge Architecture and AMD FirePro S9150 GPU Accelerators. It uses in rack watercooling and Cooling Towers to reduce the energy required for cooling. [7]
As of August 2015 [update] , the Shoubu supercomputer of RIKEN outside Tokyo Japan topped the Green500 list with 7.032 GFLOPS/W. The then-top three supercomputers of the list used PEZY-SC accelerators (GPU-like that use OpenCL) [8] by PEZY Computing with 1,024 cores each and 6–7 GFLOPS/W efficiency. [9] [10]
As of June 2019 [update] , DGX SaturnV Volta, using "NVIDIA DGX-1 Volta36, Xeon E5-2698v4 20C 2.2GHz, Infiniband EDR, NVIDIA Tesla V100", tops Green500 list with 15.113 GFLOPS/W, while ranked only 469th on Top500. [11] It is only slightly more efficient than the much larger Summit (which ranked 2nd while 1st on Top500 with 14.719 GFLOPS/W), using IBM POWER9 CPUs combined with Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs.
In June 2022, Hewlett Packard Enterprise took the lead, with all-AMD systems (CPUs and GPUs) in the 4 top positions, with the top position being over 50% more efficient than the previous year's top position. [12] Later, in Nov. 2022, Lenovo took the lead, with a small Intel-Nvidia system.
Rank | Performance per watt (GFLOPS/watt) | Name | Model Processors, GPU, Interconnect | Vendor | Site Country, year | Rmax (PFLOPS) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 72.733 | JEDI | BullSequana XH3000 Grace Hopper Superchip 72C 3GHz, Nvidia GH200 Superchip, Quad-Rail NVIDIA, InfiniBand NDR200, | ParTec [14] /EVIDEN (ex-Atos) | EuroHPC/FZJ, Germany, 2024 | 4.50 |
2 | 70.912 | ROMEO-2025 | BullSequana XH3000 Grace Hopper Superchip 72C 3GHz, NVIDIA GH200 Superchip, Quad-Rail NVIDIA, InfiniBand NDR200 | EVIDEN (ex-Atos) | ROMEO HPC Center, University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne France, 2024 | 9.86 |
3 | 69.098 | Adastra 2 | HPE Cray EX255a AMD Optimized 4th Generation EPYC 28C 1.8 GHz, AMD Instinct MI300A, Slingshot-11 | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif - Centre Informatique National de l'Enseignement Superieur (GENCI-CINES), France, 2024 | 2.53 |
4 | 68.835 | Isambard-AI phase 1 | HPE Cray EX254n NVIDIA Grace 72C 3.1GHz, NVIDIA GH200 Superchip, Slingshot-11 | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | University of Bristol, United Kingdom, 2024 | 7.42 |
5 | 68.053 | Capella | Lenovo ThinkSystem SD650 V3 AMD EPYC 9334 32C 2.7GHz, Nvidia H100 SXM5 94Gb, Infiniband NDR200, | MEGWARE | TU Dresden ZIH, Germany, 2024 | 24.06 |
6 | 67.963 | JETI JUPITER Exascale Transition Instrument | BullSequana XH3000 Grace Hopper Superchip 72C 3GHz, NVIDIA GH200 Superchip, Quad-Rail NVIDIA InfiniBand NDR200 | ParTec/EVIDEN (ex-Atos) | EuroHPC/FZJ, Germany, 2024 | 83.14 |
7 | 66.948 | Helios GPU | HPE Cray EX254n NVIDIA Grace 72C 3.1GHz, NVIDIA GH200 Superchip, Slingshot-11 | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | Cyfronet, Poland, 2024 | 19.14 |
8 | 65.396 | Henri | Lenovo ThinkSystem SR670 V2 Intel Xeon Platinum 8362 2.8 GHz (32C), Nvidia H100 80 GB PCIe, InfiniBand HDR | Lenovo | Flatiron Institute, United States, 2022 | 2.88 |
9 | 62.964 | HoreKa-Teal | ThinkSystem SD665-N V3 AMD EPYC 9354 32C 3.25GHz, Nvidia H100 94Gb SXM5, Infiniband NDR200 | Lenovo | Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, 2024 | 3.12 |
10 | 62.803 | rzAdams | HPE Cray EX255a AMD 4th Gen EPYC 24C 1.8GHz, AMD Instinct MI300A, Slingshot-11 | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | DOE/NNSA/LANL, United States, 2024 | 24.38 |
(from 2013 to 2024)
Floating point operations per second is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations.
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL benchmarks, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.
In computing, performance per watt is a measure of the energy efficiency of a particular computer architecture or computer hardware. Literally, it measures the rate of computation that can be delivered by a computer for every watt of power consumed. This rate is typically measured by performance on the LINPACK benchmark when trying to compare between computing systems: an example using this is the Green500 list of supercomputers. Performance per watt has been suggested to be a more sustainable measure of computing than Moore's Law.
Tianhe-I, Tianhe-1, or TH-1 is a supercomputer capable of an Rmax of 2.5 peta FLOPS. Located at the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin, China, it was the fastest computer in the world from October 2010 to June 2011 and was one of the few petascale supercomputers in the world.
This list compares various amounts of computing power in instructions per second organized by order of magnitude in FLOPS.
Nebulae is a petascale supercomputer located at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. Built from a Dawning TC3600 Blade system with Intel Xeon X5650 processors and Nvidia Tesla C2050 GPUs, it has a peak performance of 1.271 petaflops using the LINPACK benchmark suite. Nebulae was ranked the second most powerful computer in the world in the June 2010 list of the fastest supercomputers according to TOP500. Nebulae has a theoretical peak performance of 2.9843 petaflops. This computer is used for multiple applications requiring advanced processing capabilities. It is ranked 10th among the June 2012 list of top500.org.
Eurotech is a company dedicated to the research, development, production and marketing of miniature computers (NanoPCs) and high performance computers (HPCs).
SAGA-220 is a supercomputer built by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
Tsubame is a series of supercomputers that operates at the GSIC Center at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan, designed by Satoshi Matsuoka.
Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.
Appro was a developer of supercomputing supporting High Performance Computing (HPC) markets focused on medium- to large-scale deployments. Appro was based in Milpitas, California with a computing center in Houston, Texas, and a manufacturing and support subsidiary in South Korea and Japan.
XK7 is a supercomputing platform, produced by Cray, launched on October 29, 2012. XK7 is the second platform from Cray to use a combination of central processing units ("CPUs") and graphical processing units ("GPUs") for computing; the hybrid architecture requires a different approach to programming to that of CPU-only supercomputers. Laboratories that host XK7 machines host workshops to train researchers in the new programming languages needed for XK7 machines. The platform is used in Titan, the world's second fastest supercomputer in the November 2013 list as ranked by the TOP500 organization. Other customers include the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre which has a 272 node machine and Blue Waters has a machine that has Cray XE6 and XK7 nodes that performs at approximately 1 petaFLOPS (1015 floating-point operations per second).
The NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) is a high-performance computing (HPC) and data archival facility located in Cheyenne, Wyoming, that provides advanced computing services to researchers in the Earth system sciences.
The Cray XC30 is a massively parallel multiprocessor supercomputer manufactured by Cray. It consists of Intel Xeon processors, with optional Nvidia Tesla or Xeon Phi accelerators, connected together by Cray's proprietary "Aries" interconnect, stored in air-cooled or liquid-cooled cabinets. Each liquid-cooled cabinet can contain up to 48 blades, each with eight CPU sockets, and uses 90 kW of power. The XC series supercomputers are available with the Cray DataWarp applications I/O accelerator technology.
QPACE 2 is a massively parallel and scalable supercomputer. It was designed for applications in lattice quantum chromodynamics but is also suitable for a wider range of applications..
Summit or OLCF-4 is a supercomputer developed by IBM for use at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, United States of America. As of June 2024, it is the 9th fastest supercomputer in the world on the TOP500 list. It held the number 1 position on this list from November 2018 to June 2020. Its current LINPACK benchmark is clocked at 148.6 petaFLOPS.
Galileo is a 1.1 petaFLOPS supercomputer located at CINECA in Bologna, Italy.
The Nvidia DGX represents a series of servers and workstations designed by Nvidia, primarily geared towards enhancing deep learning applications through the use of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU). These systems typically come in a rackmount format featuring high-performance x86 server CPUs on the motherboard.
Taiwania is a supercomputer series in Taiwan owned by the National Applied Research Laboratories.
HPC5 is a supercomputer built by Dell and installed by Eni, capable of 51.721 petaflops, and is ranked 9th in the Top500 as of November 2021. It is located in the Green Data Center in Ferrera Erbognone, in Northern Italy. In June 2020, HPC5 ranked 6th in the Green500. HPC5 is an upgrade to the HPC4 system, which was built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and used by Eni. It is also called as HPC4+.