The purpose of the Green500 is to provide a ranking of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world. For decades, the notion of "performance" has been synonymous with "speed" (as measured in FLOPS, short for floating-point operations per second). 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, the emphasis on speed as the ultimate metric has caused other metrics such as reliability, availability, and usability to be largely ignored. As a result, there has been an extraordinary increase in the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a supercomputer. In order to raise awareness to other performance metrics of interest (e.g., performance per watt and energy efficiency for improved reliability), the Green500 offers lists to encourage supercomputing stakeholders to ensure that supercomputers are only simulating climate change and not creating climate change. (Courtesy of Green500)
The Green Grid + Green500 Alliance
The Green Grid and Green500 are collaborating in the area of energy efficiency metrics, methodology and workloads for high performance computing.