Nvidia Tesla GPU accelerators run most energy-efficient supercomputer

SANTA CLARA, California—Two of the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputers, based on the latest Green500 list, are powered by NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators, NVIDIA announced on June 28.

The winning system is Eurora at CINECA, Italy’s largest supercomputing center, in Casalecchio di Reno. Equipped with NVIDIA Kepler architecture-based GPU accelerators–the highest-performance, most efficient accelerators ever built–Eurora delivers 3,210 MFlops per watt, making it 2.6 times more energy-efficient than the best system using Intel CPUs alone (at Météo France). It also surpasses the most efficient Intel Xeon Phi accelerator-based system, Beacon, at the National Institute for Computational Sciences, at the University of Tennessee.

The number-two system on the June 2013 Green500 list is the Aurora Tigon supercomputer at the Selex ES facilities Chieti, Italy.

These top two systems are powered by advanced Eurotech high-performance Aurora servers, equipped with NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU accelerators.

More broadly, NVIDIA Kepler GPU accelerator-based systems in the top 100 spots on the Green500 list are 50 percent more energy efficient on average than the latest Intel Xeon Phi-based systems.

Following last week’s ISC 2013 Student Cluster Challenge in which NVIDIA GPU accelerator-based systems swept the top four spots for energy-efficient supercomputing, NVIDIA GPUs again demonstrated why they are most preferred accelerator solution among developers, system designers, and computational researchers.

“Raw performance is no longer the exclusive measure of the value and impact of supercomputers,” said Sumit Gupta, general manager of the Tesla Accelerated Computing Business Unit at NVIDIA.

“All future systems will need to deliver higher performance with reduced power consumption,” he explained. With GPU accelerators in the top two spots, the latest Green500 list demonstrates accelerators’ ability to deliver unmatched levels of energy-efficient supercomputer performance for next-generation systems.”

By delivering thousands of small energy-efficient cores operating in parallel, GPU accelerators are considerably more energy-efficient than standard CPUs. These GPU cores are optimized to run the compute-intensive portions of applications, while general-purpose CPU cores, which process in serial, are highly inefficient when running compute-intensive applications.

Issued twice annually, the Green500 list rates the 500 most energy-efficient supercomputers based on performance achieved relative to power consumed.

For more information and the complete June 2013 Green500 list visit: https://green500.org/.