Supercomputer goes for a green spin
It looks like the world of supercomputing could get greener after a new line of high-performance systems have been developed.
Steps described as "innovative" have been taken by the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) at the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory to reduce its carbon footprint.
You may be interested to discover that the ALCF needs slightly over one megawatt of power in order to run its computer centre, featuring the new Blue Gene/P machine.
"Because the ALCF can effectively meet the demands of this world-class computer, the laboratory ends up saving taxpayers more than a million dollars a year," claims Paul Messina, director of science at the ALCF.
The computer is ranked the second most energy-efficient in the world because of its ability to deliver over 350 million calculations a second per watt.
And in less contemporary engineering feats, the world’s first computer developed in Greek times - known as the Antikythera mechanism - has been rebuilt, New Scientist recently reported.
Written by Luke Sutcliffe.
Filed under: Industry News
