Intel's "Beacon" the World's Most Energy-Efficient Supercomputer

The latest Green500 list announced today named The National Institute for Computational Sciences' "Beacon" system as the world's most energy-efficient supercomputer. "Beacon" is powered by Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors 5110P and Intel Xeon processors E5-2670 and delivers nearly two-and-a-half billion floating-point operations per second per watt (2.49 GFlops/Watt) and peak performance of 112,200 gigaflops while consuming only 44.89 kW of power. Sean Koehl from Intel Labs shares his view in a blog on why this achievement is a significant milestone for Intel and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor and what it takes to design the world's most energy-efficient supercomputer.