Energy efficiency - including performance per watt for the most computationally demanding workloads - is a core design principle in developing IBM systems. IBM offers the broadest range of generally applicable supercomputers represented on the Green500 List including Blue Gene, Power servers, iDataPlex, BladeCenter and hybrid clusters.

The number one most energy efficient system in the world - a supercomputer built at the Jülich supercomputing centre in Germany as part of a collaboration between IBM and an academic consortium of universities and research centres - produces more than 723 Mflops (millions of floating point operations per second) per watt of energy.

The IBM supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratories - which first broke through the petaflop barrier and was second on the recently announced Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers - is ranked the sixth most energy-efficient supercomputer in the world, capable of over 444 Mflops per watt of energy. A non-IBM supercomputer that topped the Top500 list placed 44 on the Green500 List, producing only 253 Mflops per watt.

"Supercomputers can no longer focus only on raw performance. The era of simply adding more processors is coming to a close", stated David Turek, vice president, deep computing, IBM. "Clients need to be able to run supercomputers anywhere, not only places that have cheap power. As the Green500 proves, IBM has focused on this issue for some time and is well positioned to usher in performance breakthroughs along with efficiency gains."