Bangalore: Energy efficiency is crucial in today's scenario, where cost cutting and environmental protection are significant. The supercomputers are also going green and IBM is leading the list by manufacturing the greenest supercomputer in the world, according to the Green500 supercomputer list published by Green500.org.

A key factor in determining a supercomputer's energy efficiency is the number of operations per watt. IBM supercomputer emerged as the leader based on an IBM BladeCenter QS22 located in Poland at the Interdisciplinary Center for Mathematical and Computational Modeling at the University of Warsaw. The computer produces more than 536 Mflops (millions of floating point operations per second) per watt of energy. The world's fastest supercomputer, the IBM supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratories, came in fourth place for energy efficiency, producing over 444 Mflops per watt of energy.

The findings also revealed that the average efficiency of the supercomputers rose by 10 percent, even as the aggregate power of the machines on the list increased 15 percent. The rankings also showed that 18 of the top 20 greenest supercomputers in the world are made by IBM. "Modern supercomputers can no longer focus only on raw performance," said David Turek, Vice President of Deep Computing at IBM. "To be commercially viable these systems most also be energy efficient. IBM has a rich history of innovation that has significantly increased energy efficiency of our systems at all levels of the system that are designed to simultaneously reduce data center costs and energy use." With more interest being shown by organizations to go green , these supercomputers can now cash in on the opportunity.

Unveiled in 2007, the Green500 list is published two to three times a year by Green500.org. It typically serves as a follow-up to the Top 500 list of worldwide supercomputers announced by Top500.org.