IEEE Spectrum reports three new supercomputers powered by Nvidia’s Grace Hopper CPU+GPU chips topped the Green500 for June 2024. The list ranks the most efficient supercomputers in the world. The three new supercomputers that broke into the list are Jülich Supercomputing Centre’s JEDI, the 1 ExaFLOPS Jupiter Supercomputer, University of Bristol’s Isambard-AI phase 1, and Cyfronet’s Helios GPU.
The Green500 is the energy efficiency counterpart to the Top500, which lists supercomputers according to their power. Most of the powerful supercomputers in the world remain unchanged, with Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier, Argonne National Laboratory’s Aurora, and Microsoft Azure’s Eagle still taking the top spots. However, these supercomputers are power-hungry, with the top computer requiring at least 22,000 kilowatts to run — equal to the power requirements of more than 15,700 households.
The entry of these new power-efficient supercomputers shows the industry’s changing priorities. Instead of adding more powerful chips with greater kilowatt requirements, many institutions are now going for better efficiency—i.e., getting more computing performance per watt. This is a crucial move for the general industry, especially as the Semiconductor Industry Association estimated in 2015 (PDF) that computing’s power requirements will exceed global production by 2040 if efficiency isn’t improved.
Because of this increasing power demand, Microsoft is looking at nuclear reactors to power its data centers. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also said that power constraints will bottleneck AI progress. “A lot of data centers are on the order of 50 megawatts or 100 megawatts, or like a big one might be 150 megawatts,” Zuckerberg said. He then added later, “But then when you start getting into building a data center that’s like 300 megawatts or 500 megawatts, or a gigawatt; I mean, no one has built a single gigawatt data center yet, so I think it will happen. I mean, this is only a matter of time.”
