Sequoia earns top ranking on Green500

IBM's BlueGene/Q, which will be deployed at the Laboratory in 2012 as Sequoia, has earned the title of the world's most efficient supercomputer from the Green500. A prototype of the BlueGene/Q next-generation system was announced Thursday as No. 1 on the Green500 list.

Energy efficiency, including performance per watt for the most computationally demanding workloads, has long been a goal of increasingly powerful supercomputing systems. Energy efficient supercomputers can allow users to realize critical cost savings by lowering power consumption, reducing expenses associated with cooling and scaling to larger systems while maintaining an acceptable power consumption bill.

IBM Blue Gene/Q is scheduled to be deployed in 2012 at two U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) national laboratories -- Argonne National Laboratory and LLNL, both of which collaborated closely with IBM on the design of Blue Gene, influencing many aspects of the system's software and hardware.

The Green500 has been compiled since 2005 by computer scientists and engineers at Virginia Tech to emphasize energy efficiency as an important component of supercomputing performance, in addition to speed as measured in floating point operations per second (FLOPS). For more, see the The Green 500 Website .

Designed to be a 20-petaFLOP/s (quadrillion floating point operations per second) system, Sequoia will be used by the National Nuclear Security Administration's Advanced Simulation and Computing program to conduct stockpile stewardship research. Sequoia will be installed in the Laboratory's Terascale Simulation Facility starting in early 2012.

Read the complete IBM news release