Green500

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.

In 2022, Hewlett Packard Enterprise took the lead (then later in Nov. 2022 Lenovo took the lead, though with a much smaller Nvidia based system), with AMD-based systems (AMD CPUs and AMD GPUs) in the 4 top positions, with the top position over 50% more efficient than the previous year (Japanese) top position. And number two on the list (the current fastest on TOP500) is also over 50% more efficient than the currently most efficient (and much smaller) Nvidia-based system. No large Nvidia-based system make the top 10 positions of Graph500 (smaller ones in 7th to 10th, nor any longer any (small or large) ARM-based (Fugaku was at the top of the list in June 2021).

History

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.

Green 500 List

Top 10 positions of GREEN500 in June 2024^[12]

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[13]/EVIDEN (ex-Atos)	EuroHPC/FZJ,   Germany, 2024	4.50
2	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
3	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
4	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
5	64.381	preAlps	HPE Cray EX254n NVIDIA Grace 72C 3.1GHz, NVIDIA GH200 Superchip, Slingshot-11	Hewlett Packard Enterprise	Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS),    Switzerland, 2024	15.47
6	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
7	62.684	Frontier TDS	HPE Cray EX235a AMD Optimized 3rd Generation EPYC 64C 2 GHz, AMD Instinct MI250X, Slingshot-11	Hewlett Packard Enterprise	OE/SC/Oak Ridge National Laboratory,   United States, 2022	19.20
8	59.287	Venado	HPE Cray EX254n NVIDIA Grace 72C 3.1GHz, NVIDIA GH200 Superchip, Slingshot-11	Hewlett Packard Enterprise	DOE/NNSA/LANL,   United States, 2024	98.51
9	58.021	Adastra	HPE Cray EX235a AMD Optimized 3rd Generation EPYC 64C 2 GHz, AMD Instinct MI250X, Slingshot-11	Hewlett Packard Enterprise	Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif - Centre Informatique National de l'Enseignement Superieur (GENCI-CINES),   France, 2022	46.10
10	56.983	Setonix – GPU	HPE Cray EX235a AMD Optimized 3rd Generation EPYC 64C 2 GHz, AMD Instinct MI250X, Slingshot-11	Hewlett Packard Enterprise	Pawsey Supercomputing Centre,   Australia, 2022	27.16

Historical development

Energy efficiency of top-ranked computers (gigaflops/watt)

(from 2013 to 2024)

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

13

14

15

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17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

References

1. "The Green500". Archived from the original on 2016-06-20.
2. "Green 500 list ranks supercomputers". iTnews Australia. Archived from the original on 2008-10-22.
3. "University of Tennessee Supercomputer Sets World Record for Energy Efficiency". National Institute for Computational Sciences News. University of Tennessee & Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Retrieved 21 November 2012.
4. "Beacon - Appro GreenBlade - Green500 list". top500.org. Retrieved 21 November 2012.
5. "Eurotech Eurora, the PRACE prototype deployed by Cineca and INFN, scores first in Green500 list". Cineca. Archived from the original on 13 July 2013. Retrieved 28 June 2013.
6. "Eurora - Aurora Tigon - Top500 list". top500.org. Retrieved 28 June 2013.
7. "The Green500 List - November 2014". Archived from the original on 2015-02-22.
8. Hindriksen, Vincent (2015-08-02). "The knowns and unknowns of the PEZY-SC accelerator at RIKEN". StreamHPC. Retrieved 2019-10-21.
9. Tiffany, Tiffany (August 4, 2015). "Japan Takes Top Three Spots on Green500 List". HPCWire. Retrieved 8 January 2016.
10. "PEZY & ExaScaler Step Up on the Green500 List with Immersive Cooling". InsideHPC. September 23, 2015. Retrieved 8 January 2016.
11. "June 2019 | TOP500 Supercomputer Sites". www.top500.org. Retrieved 2019-08-12.
12. "JUNE 2024". www.top500.org. Retrieved 2024-06-03.
13. "Pioneers in purpose-built supercomputer solutions". ParTec. Retrieved 2024-06-05.