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QPACE (QCD Parallel Computing on the Cell) has been distinguished as the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputer.
QPACE tops the Green500 list, which provides world ranking of energy-efficient supercomputers. The performances of supercomputers were exclusively rated based on speed, earlier. So computers using high amount of energy were developed, since little care was given on energy efficiency.
But as discussions regarding scarcity of natural resources and energy became more prominent, the concept also became visible for supercomputers. The QPACE supercomputer stands at 110 on the TOP500 list and can compute at 55 teraflop/s.
QPACE was developed by an academic group of universities and research centers along with Germany-based IBM research and development center in Boblingen within the structure of a state-sponsored research association.
It was deployed during mid-2009 with four racks each at the Research Center Julich and at the University of Wuppertal.
It is being used for the simulation of fundamental forces in elementary particle physics, particularly in the research area of quantum chromodynamics (QCD).
The heart of QPACE is the IBM PowerXCell 8i processor, an improvement of the Cell/B.E. processor, which was originally developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM for the Sony PlayStation 3.
With its nine processor cores, the chip can perform a large number of calculations simultaneously and at a high speed. The new concept of QPACE contains connecting processors by a network of programmable units, called Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), to an efficient scalable computer.
Each of the QPACE installations in Julich and Wuppertal can attain a maximum performance of 100 TeraFlops (double precision).
That equals to 100 trillion (100,000,000,000,000) computing operations per second.
The technology concepts developed for the QPACE project are setting the standard for future high-performance computers.
