The Green500 List: Encouraging Sustainable Supercomputing

TLDR

Supercomputers’ performance‑at‑any‑cost design ignores their high power consumption and heat dissipation, limiting future performance gains without fundamental design changes. The paper proposes a Green500 List to rank supercomputers by speed and power, aiming to motivate the HPC community and data‑center operators to design more power‑efficient systems.

Abstract

The performance-at-any-cost design mentality ignores supercomputers' excessive power consumption and need for heat dissipation and will ultimately limit their performance. Without fundamental change in the design of supercomputing systems, the performance advances common over the past two decades won't continue. The HPC community needs a Green500 List to rank supercomputers on speed and power requirements and to supplement the TOP500 List. Vendors and system architects worldwide take substantial pride and invest tremendous effort toward making the biannual TOP500 List. We anticipate that the Green500 List effort will do the same and encourage the HPC community and operators of Internet data centers to design more power-efficient supercomputers and large-scale data centers.