IBM supercomputer is world’s most energy efficient

The prototype computer scooped the number one spot on the Green500 List for achieving 2,097mflops/s. It marked the first time the 2,000 bar had been surpassed on this scale since the Green500 launched in November 2007. IBM said its designs accounted for approximately half of the top 100 supercomputers on the list, and six of the top 10. It claims that for every $1 spent on electricity with the largest petascale system on the Green500 list, clients would spend less than $0.40 on a system based on its Blue Gene/Q supercomputer and would be 2.5x more energy efficient. The company's supercomputer is scheduled to be deployed in 2012 by two of the US Department of Energy's national laboratories, Argonne National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Columbia University and the University of Edinburgh also contributed to Blue Gene/Q's processor chip design. Both institutions plan to use the system to advance quantum chromodynamics, which is a part of the study of particle physics.