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Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Dave Turek, vice president, IBM Deep Computing. IBM is well known for dominating the Top500 lists of supercomputers. Less well known is the Green500 List, which ranks supercomputers not only on feeds and speeds, but energy consumption. This year, IBM dominated that list with 17 out of the top 20 machines on the list. This blog post highlights the significance of this achievement for Smarter Planet.
Energy efficiency is quickly becoming one of the most important metrics of supercomputing value. Just a few short years ago high performance computing (HPC) clients were concerned primarily with performance, and the cost of performance. The conversation has shifted dramatically. HPC clients are now equally concerned about power consumption and cooling requirements. For good reason, the cost to power an HPC environment today is nearly as much as the hardware.
Fifty percent of the energy consumed in today’s average data center goes toward cooling the systems and preventing overheating. Overheating, in turn, leads to reduced reliability. In fact, Wu-Chun Feng of Virginia Tech, one of the founders of the Green500 List of energy-efficient supercomputers believes that for every 10 degree Celsius increase in temperature the system failure rate doubles.
