The Grape-DR topped the Little Green500 List of energy-efficient supercomputers, achieving 815.43 MFLOPS per Watt compared to IBM’s second place machine, located in Germany, capable of 773.38 MFLOPS per Watt. Only 775 megaflops per Watt? How embarrassing.
The Grape-DR supercomputer, which in addition to be the greenest is apparently also the messiest, pairs its 64 Core i7 processors with four Grape-DR accelerator chips, each of which consumes only 50 watts of power. All together the chips improve the efficiency of the supercomputer five fold.
But being the greenest does not mean fastest – the Grape-DR’s peak performance is 23.4 TFLOPS, putting it just shy of 500th place on the top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. That’s OK, Grape-DR, you’re number 1 in Mother Nature’s heart. [TechOn via Technabob]
matt
Tuesday, July 13, 2010 at 11:07 AMa modern day graphics card can achieve over 1Tflops
ONE ps3 can theoretically do about 200 GFlops
(those of a keen mathematical mind will have figured a 920 can do about 36Gflops)
lets not forget there is a not insignificant cost to the environment by using soo much space. (and time, for that matter)
but mainly I find it interesting that it is measured just in flops, because if you were only interested in floating point operations, you would use a graphics card. or even a ps3. not a pure general purpose CPU like the 920 (as awesome as it is)
on the issue of time, the fastest super computer in the world would be 9000 times faster. i.e what would take this super computer running as efficiently as possible 2 and a half hours, the fastest super computer could do in 1 second.
Dexx
Wednesday, July 14, 2010 at 4:29 PM@matt – I think you need to read the article again…
The system is on the Top 500 Super Computers list. It’s got a peak performance of 23.4TFlops.
The main point is to minimise power usage, and while I don’t have “Flops” figures for Video cards – They use a LOT of power to get the performance they do.
As for a PS3? It’s got an old GPU, and a multicore CPU? I don’t understand why you think it would be better at these tasks than any other modern CPU?
The Cell is still a general purpose CPU – It’s just scalable, and a different architecture to other CPU’s…