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The Green500 list: escapades to exascale

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Computer Science - Research and Development

Abstract

Energy efficiency is now a top priority. The first four years of the Green500 have seen the importance of energy efficiency in supercomputing grow from an afterthought to the forefront of innovation as we approach a point where systems become increasingly constrained by power consumption. Even so, the landscape of energy efficiency in supercomputing continues to shift—with new trends emerging and unexpected shifts in previous predictions.

This paper offers an in-depth analysis of the new and shifting trends in the Green500. In addition, the analysis offers early indications of the path that we are taking towards exascale and what an exascale machine in 2018 is likely to look like. Lastly, we discuss the emerging efforts and collaborations toward designing and establishing better metrics, methodologies, and workloads for the measurement and analysis of energy-efficient supercomputing.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Mark Gardner and Heshan Lin for their support and the Green500 community for their continued support and feedback, in particular, participants at the Green500 Birds-of-a-Feather sessions over the last four years.

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Correspondence to Tom Scogland.

Additional information

This work was supported in part by NSF grant CCF-0848670, a DoD National Defense Science & Engineering Graduate Fellowship (NDSEG), and Supermicro.

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Scogland, T., Subramaniam, B. & Feng, Wc. The Green500 list: escapades to exascale. Comput Sci Res Dev 28, 109–117 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-012-0212-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-012-0212-6

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