Moscow, December 7, 2011. — SKIF Aurora SUSU supercomputer built by RSC Group on the basis of Intel® Xeon® 5680 processors and liquid cooling and installed at South Ural State University (Chelyabinsk) became the most energy efficient Russian HPC system according to a new edition of Green500 rating (www.green500.org) published in November 2011. The system took the 109th position in the rating. Currently there are only five Russian supercomputers in Green500; their number decreased more than twice compared to the previous edition of the rating.
Green500 includes world’s most energy efficient computing clusters (by performance-to-energy consumption ratio). The rating is calculated and published twice a year based on Top500 list of world’s most powerful supercomputers.
According to Green500, SKIF Aurora SUSU supercomputer shows energy efficiency at the level of 349.78 MFLOPS per Watt and outpaces its nearest Russian competitor (153rd position in Green500) almost by a factor of 1.5 with about 10 times as less power consumption. It is worth noting that SKIF Aurora SUSU computing system with a peak performance of 117 TFLOPS was built on the basis of the highest-performing at that time processors Intel® Xeon® 5680 with the clock speed of 3.33 GHz and heat dissipation of 130 W without using graphics accelerators. The system’s leading position among all Russian supercomputers listed in Green500 demonstrates the fact that energy efficiency depends not on graphics accelerators, but on know-how to build energy efficient supercomputers based on powerful central processing units and advanced liquid cooling.
Currently SKIF Aurora SUSU is on the 3rd position in Top50 of most powerful supercomputers in CIS countries (September 2011), as well as on the 121st position in the latest edition of Top500 rating of the world’s most powerful supercomputers (November 2011). The computing cluster’s best result in Top500 was 87th position in the previous edition of the rating (June 2011).
“We are happy that the most powerful supercomputing system built by RSC is a de facto the most energy efficient HPC system in Russia and CIS, as shown in the new edition of Green500 rating. Undoubtedly, our energy efficient RCS Tornado architecture with liquid cooling for generally available standard server boards made a great contribution in this success. Most computing nodes of SKIF Aurora SUSU are based on this architecture", said Alexey Shmelev, chief executive officer, RCS Group.
