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posted by CoolHand on Sunday August 02 2015, @01:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the binary-tree-hugging dept.

The June 2015 edition of the Green500 supercomputer list is finally out, and the top system, Shoubu at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) in Japan, has surpassed the 7 gigaflops per watt milestone. The following two systems surpassed 6 GFLOPS/W, and the current #4 system led the November 2014 list at 5.272 GFLOPS/W.

Shoubu is ranked #160 on the June 2015 edition of the TOP500 list, with an RMAX of 412.7 teraflops. Green500 reports its efficiency at 7,031.58 MFLOPS/W with a power consumption of 50.32 kW. The supercomputer uses Intel Xeon E5-2618Lv3 Haswell CPUs, "new many-core accelerators from PEZY-SC," and the InfiniBand data interconnect. The top 32 systems on the new Green500 list are heterogeneous, using GPU and "many-core" accelerators from the likes of AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and PEZY Computing. The PEZY-SC accelerator used in the top 3 systems reportedly delivers 1.5 teraflops of double-precision floating-point performance using 1024 cores built on a 28nm process, while consuming just 90 W.

Green500 notes Japanese dominance in the supercomputer efficiency rankings. Aside from Shoubu at RIKEN, the #2 and #3 systems are located at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan. Eight of the top twenty systems on the newest Green500 list are located in Japan.


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2015, @11:47PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2015, @11:47PM (#217155)

    Video is a 13 months old as of this writing. More interestingly, and no one here brought up nor in the comments of the video itself, is that this appears, at least to me, to be an optical ANALOG computer:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer [wikipedia.org]

    The give-away in the video the explanation of how it works, translating digital data into analog waveforms riding the light, running it through some optics, and then turning it back to digital signals again--no quantum-anything, nor does this seem to be a digital photonic computer with optical transistors and the like. The huge difference from previous analog computers, besides the optics, is that the whole thing is on a single die, if I'm understanding right.

    Since the (vast?) majority of supercomputer simulations involve analog phenomena, particularly fluidics, going to analog computers makes sense; I could possibly see this not working down at the quantum level, though, but that's just a guess from this armchair quarterback.

    I also remember years ago I came across a Russian processor manufacturer's web site talking about how they never gave up on analog computers "unlike the West" and their computers could outperform Western ones, at least at certain things. I never saw it after that, nor saw it mentioned anywhere else, but I find it interesting that what is old is now new again under a different name, yet again.

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