USA Supercomputer Splurge

That's right, inthezone. They measure the performance of supercomputers using a program called LINPACK or LAPACK, a program for performing numerical linear algebra. The highest score measured using the LINPACK benchmark suite is the number which is used to rank the computers, measured in trillions of floating point operations per second, i.e. Teraflops.

The Road Runner Supercomputer at Los Alamos received an RMAX of 1026 Teraflops, or 1.026 Petaflops, using 122400 processor cores.

The next closest supercomputer had an RMAX of 478.2 Teraflops, using 212992 processor cores. This is the IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

SOURCE:

Computer cluster

First, from my last post above, you can see the difference between the #1 and the #2 supercomputers. Roadrunner achieves twice the Teraflops using a system with 40% fewer physical processor cores. That alone would net an energy savings.

IBM is building a new data center for Rackforce in Canada. Rackforce indicates that their old data center had a PUV or Power Usege Effectivness rating of 3.0. Their new data center has a PUV of 1.3. Watch their video.

IBM is also using heat exchangers to help with cooling costs. One such system they built in Denver, Co, takes advantage of the climate in Denver:

When exterior temperature and humidity levels are favorable, the new data center's technology switches to free-cooling mode -- utilizing a water economizer to dramatically reduce energy consumption.

Variable-speed pumps and motors were also installed in the air conditioning systems to balance the cooling capacities to the actual load. This further reduces energy usage and costs, and water taps were installed throughout the facility, providing flexibility for water-cooled IT equipment -- like the IBM Power 6 technology -- as well as today's air-cooled profiles. The center also uses low-sulfur fuels to reduce emissions from backup generators.

IBM Project Big Green Tackles Global Energy Crisis

IBM scientists have developed a method to cool computer chips that have circuits and components stacked on top of each other with tiny rivers of water. IBM demonstrated a prototype that integrates the cooling system into the three dimensional (3-D) chips by piping water directly between each layer in the stack. These so-called 3-D chip stacks -- which take chips and memory devices that traditionally sit side-by-side on a silicon wafer and stacks them together on top of one another -- presents one of the most promising approaches to enhancing chip performance beyond its predicted limits, while simultaneously reducing the energy consumed by data centers.

IBM is innovating every step in the data center process to maximize efficiency and to reduce cost. This is a company that is solving problems before they become crises. I'll be keeping an eye on IBM.