The world's top supercomputers may be performance powerhouses, but they're also energy hogs, often using enough power to light up a small city.

Such power consumption prompted two professors at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University to come up with a way to commend companies that build energy-efficient supercomputers. Kirk Cameron and Wu Feng, both associate professors in the Blacksburg, Va., university's computer science department, are preparing to release the Green500 List of the most energy-efficient supercomputer installations in the world.

"The list is meant to encourage people to develop systems that use power efficiently," said Cameron. "If you do that, you decrease costs, which are really high -- between $800,000 and $1 million a year per megawatt. It's ridiculously expensive. You're looking at $1 million to $4 million a year, easily, to run a mega system."

The Green500 List is a rating of the energy efficiency of machines that make the Top500 List of supercomputers, a ranking of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The 30th installment of the biannual Top500 List is slated to be issued on Nov. 14 at the Supercomputing Conference in Reno, Nev.

The Green500 List is expected to be released just a few days after the Top500 List, giving the researchers time to rank any newcomers.

Cameron said he and Feng have put together a make-shift green list for the past few years, but it only rated some of the supercomputers ranked on the Top500 List, and then only rated them by their peak performance numbers.

This year's list, he said, really marks its official coming out, with its attempt to rank every machine on the Top500 List. They have asked users of the Top500 machines to provide measurements based on a standard workload. Cameron explained that they hope to receive detailed information from about 100 of the supercomputers -- calculating energy consumption, heat output and efficiency using the power the machine is consuming.

Machines at user sites that don't provide the requested data will be measured by peak performance numbers. Researchers will give preference to the supercomputers that they have working data on, according to Cameron.

So, which supercomputers do the researchers find tend to be more efficient?

For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright Computerworld, Inc.

Whitepapers

• The Trend from UNIX to Linux in SAP(r) Data Centers
• Secure Wireless Printing Options
• Improve Virtual Storage TCO by Comparing Vendors
• Making IT Invisible
• Best Practices for VMware ESX Server
• Virtualizing Storage for VMware Success

View more DATA CENTER whitepapers

Webcasts

• Branch Office Trends and Best Practices
• Best Practices for Deploying WAN Optimization for Disaster Recovery
• Tips and Techniques for Remote Data Backup and Delivery
• WAN Optimization Landscape
• Oracle Database 11g: Advances in Compression, Real Application Testing and Data Guard
• Solutions to the Toughest IT Challenges in Remote Offices

View more DATA CENTER webcasts

Special Reports

• Executive Guide: Storage Heats Up
• Data Centers: At the center of the action
• Executive Guide: Virtualization Reality Check
• Executive Guide: Data Center Decisions
• Get More From Your WAN
• Network World Executive Guide: Perfecting Application Performance Management

View more DATA CENTER special reports