The Irish Centre for High End Computing‘s newest computer, Fionn, is not only the fastest system in Ireland in terms of TFlops, but the most power efficient x86-based system on the Top500 list, when not taking acceleration into account. The full story, from SGI, is here. SGI actually makes the top four of the five most power efficient of such machines. They are: ICHEC’s Fionn, the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) – both Spruce A and Spruce B installations, and Germany’s T-Systems CASE-2 installation.
Digging into the Top500 data we can reveal that these four systems stack up like this:
ICHEC (Fionn): 1226.6 MFlops/Watt
AWE (Spruce B): 1121.26 MFlops/Watt
AWE (Spruce A): 1121.2 MFlops/Watt
T-Systems (CASE-2): 1038.33 MFlops/Watt
That’s either some intense sibling rivalry between Spruce A and Spruce B, or a typo in data entry over at Top500, we’re not sure.
Either way, Fionn must be one of the greenest of all the computers out there, no matter how you look at it. 
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