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Top Ranked Green500 energy efficient supercomputer is L-CSC based on AMD FirePro™ S9150

Tags: Sapphire, AMD (NYSE:AMD), ASUSTeK (TPE:2357)

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At Supercomputing 2014 recently, the announcement that everyone was waiting for has finally come: The Top Ranked Green500 energy efficient supercomputer in the world is: The L-CSC cluster, powered by AMD FireProTM S9150 Server GPUs.

A new supercomputer, L-CSC from the GSI Helmholtz Center, emerged as the most energy-efficient (or greenest) supercomputer in the world, according to the 16th edition of the twice-yearly Green500 list. The L-CSC cluster was the first and only supercomputer on the list to surpass 5 gigaflops/watt (billions of operations per second per watt). Like so many of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world over the past few years, L-CSC is a heterogeneous supercomputer that is powered by GPU accelerators, namely AMD FireProTM S9150 GPUs. It marks the first time that a supercomputer using AMD GPUs has held the top spot.

Each of the 160 ASUS ESC4000 G2S nodes of the new L-CSC cluster include four AMD FireProTM S9150 server GPUs, for a total GPU peak of 3.25 petaFLOPS single precision and 1.62 petaFLOPS double precision performance.

With 5:27 GFLOPS per watt using 600 AMD FireProTM S9150s, the GSI L-CSC cluster delivers 20% better efficiency than the top ranked cluster on the June 2014 Green500 List. The cluster is enabling Lattice Quantum Chromo Dynamics (Lattice QCD) computational research using one of the fastest OpenCL implementations for research applications in the world. Lattice QCD calculations are applicable to a range of studies in high energy and heavy ion physics.

Quote from the chairman at Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies: "Supercomputers are inevitable in today's research. The scientific challenges require computers as fast as possible, but we have to keep power consumption and costs in mind, in order to use our available resources as well as possible."

"The ASUS ESC4000 G2S servers and the AMD FireProTM S9150 GPUs are an extremely powerful basis for the L-CSC cluster and they provide the compute capabilities we need for our research. The large 16GB of memory of the AMD FireProTM S9150 server GPUs allows us to run most LQCD computations on one GPU without inter-GPU and inter-node communication resulting in very efficient LQCD application operation. We have chosen a multi-GPU approach with four GPU boards per server to enable an extremely cost-efficient and energy-efficient configuration."

About the Green500:

The Green500 has provided a ranking of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world since November 2007. For decades, the notion of supercomputer "performance" has been synonymous with "speed." This particular focus has led to the emergence of supercomputers that consume egregious amounts of electrical power and produce so much heat that extravagant cooling facilities must be constructed to ensure proper operation. In addition, when there is an emphasis on speed as the ultimate metric, it often comes at the expense of other performance metrics, such as energy efficiency, reliability, availability, and usability. As a result, there has been an extraordinary increase in the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a supercomputer. Consequently, the Green500 seeks to raise the awareness in energy efficiency of supercomputing and to drive it as a first-order design constraint on par with speed.

http://www.green500.org

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