FRANKFURT, Germany, BERKELEY, Calif., and BLACKSBURG, Va., May 6 — The ISC Group, promoter of the TOP500 list, is pleased to announce that the Green500 will be integrated with the TOP500 project as of today, hence streamlining all future submissions to be based on joint power submission rules. The integration follows nearly a decade of collaboration and several years of discussions between the two projects as well as with the Energy-Efficient High-Performance Computing (EE HPC) Working Group.

The TOP500 and Green500 lists will continue to remain separate, but all submission data will now be collected via a single online portal at http://top500.org/submit. Submission instructions are to be found on both the TOP500 and Green500 sites. The joint power submission rules are now online.

Going forward, the ISC Group will host and maintain the web presence of Green500, which is currently undergoing a re-design to reflect the integration. The new site will be officially launched at the ISC High Performance conference in Frankfurt, Germany this June. The 47th TOP500 list, and the 19th Green500 list, will be presented in a historical ceremony during this year’s conference opening session.

“This merge is of great significance to the high performance computing community,” said Erich Strohmaier, co-founder of TOP500. “Both projects will now be maintained under a common set of rules for data submission, which will simplify the process for submitters and provide a consistent set of data for the historical record.”

The Green500 team, led by project co-founder Dr. Wu-chun Feng, will remain active in evaluating and approving the power data from submissions. “With power clearly being a first-order design constraint on par with performance, it is important to establish consistent and rigorous power measurement methodologies for the HPC community,” says Wu Feng. “This integration not only seeks to create a unified portal for the reporting of power of supercomputers, but it also seeks to establish common measurement methodologies, as put forth by the Energy-Efficient HPC Working Group in collaboration with the Green500 and TOP500.”

About the TOP500 List

The TOP500 list catalogues the world’s fastest 500 supercomputers, based on the popular Linpack benchmark. The first version of the list started as an exercise for a small conference in Germany in June 1993. Out of curiosity, the authors decided to revisit the list in November 1993 to see how things had changed. About that time they realized they might be on to something and decided to continue compiling the list, which is now a much-anticipated, much-watched and much-debated twice-yearly event. The TOP500 list is compiled by Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; and Martin Meuer of Prometeus, Germany. More information is at top500.org.

About the Green500 List

The Green500 provides a ranking of the 500 most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world. For decades, the notion of “performance” has been synonymous with speed, as measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). This particular focus has led to the emergence of supercomputers that consume large amounts of electrical power and produce so much heat that complex cooling facilities must be constructed to ensure proper operation. The initial idea for such a list came from a keynote talk at a high-performance, power-aware computing workshop in 2005 by Green500 co-founder Wu Feng, then of Los Alamos National Laboratory and now of Virginia Tech. This idea was then further explored and cultivated with Green500 co-founder, Chung-Hsing Hsu, and led to the establishment of the Green500 in November 2006. The first official release of the list came in November 2007 from Wu Feng and Kirk Cameron of Virginia Tech. Since that time, the Green500 list has been primarily compiled by Wu Feng of Virginia Tech; Thomas Scogland of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; and Balaji Subramaniam of Argonne National Laboratory with earlier contributions coming from Jeremy Archuleta of Virginia Tech and now at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Source: ISC Group