Meet The Greenest Supercomputer In The World, Powered By Intel And Nvidia

Bangalore: After a number of PCs and tablets going green, supercomputers too seem to be making inroads into this territory; and are cutting on the power consumption with respect to performance per watt, reports ZDNet.

The super computer developed by Eurotech, and controlled by the non-profit consortium CINECA, a group made up of 57 Italian universities and institutions, is said to be the world’s greenest supercomputer, and named as Eurora. It claims to mange 3,150 megaflops per watt, if compared Beacon supercomputer at the National Institute for Computational Sciences and University of Tennessee, the current leader of the Green-500 list, which only manages 2,499.44 megaflops per watt, making Eurora as the world’s greenest supercomputer.    

The supercomputer is based on Eurotech’s Aurora node hardware, and consists of 64 nodes, with each node consisting of a pair of Intel Xeon E5-2687W processors, two Nvidia Tesla K20 GPU accelerator cards, an Altera Stratix V FPGA, 16GB DDR3 RAM, and a 160GB solid-state drive. Each node is about the size of a notebook and it’s capable of executing 1,700 gigaflops per second. Each of the nodes is 30 times more powerful that a regular desktop PC, yet 15 times more power efficient.

Eurotech uses a unique liquid cooling system that allows a compact yet performance based design, packing in 256 Tesla K20 accelerators and CPUs in a single rack while delivering 350 teraflops of peak performance.

If single rack alone is considered, it will rank among top 100 supercomputers in the world, according to Top500 list. Eurora, with 9 racks would deliver over 3.1 petaflops of performance, in turn securing its place in top 10 most powerful supercomputers of the world.

Eurotech estimates that Cineca will save 2.5 million kilowatt-hours in energy, which translates into a saving of $500,000, and eliminating 1,500 tons of CO2.