Supercomputers are tasked with performing massive calculations that can't be practically done in any sort of reasonable time on regular computers. For that, supercomputers have special power and cooling needs, but as we can see from the Department of Information Science at the University of Tokyo, supercomputers can be green-minded too.
The Japanese supercomputer system, called Grape-DR, is ranked as the greenest supercomputer on the planet. Its performance over power is 815.43 MFLOPS per watt, besting the second place IBM's 773.38 MFLOPS per watt in Germany.
The Grape-DR is composed of 64 Core i7-920 microprocessors, and Asus motherboard, 18 GB of DDR3 memory, and a custom accelerator board.
The custom accelerator board, developed by a professor at the University of Tokyo, enhances performance of the Core i7-920 system by about five times, according to TechOn.
While the Grape-DR is the most energy efficient supercomputer in the world, it's not even near the fastest. Its total performance of 23.4 TFLOPS is below the 24.67 TFLOPS needed to crack the top 500 supercomputers in the world.
