World's 'most green' supercomputer in red-hot battle between
Intel, Nvidia Uni boffins demand more bang for their watt
Analysis Non-profit consortium CINECA has deployed what may be
the greenest supercomputer in the world at its Bologna centre in
Italy. Called Eurora, the new machine claims it can perform
3,150 megaflops per watt, compared to the 2,499.44 achieved by
Green-500  king the Beacon supercomputer at the National
Institute for Computational Sciences and University of
Tennessee. CINECA is owned by 57 Italian universities and other
institutions, and has the largest computing centre in Italy.
Eurora was built by Eurotech and is a prototype of its Aurora
Tigon product range. The supercomputer consists of 64 nodes,
each of which has two Intel Xeon E5-2687W CPUs, two Nvidia Tesla
K20 GPU accelerator cards, an Altera Stratix V FPGA, 16GB DDR3
RAM and 160GB in solid-state storage. According to Eurotech,
each node, similar in size to a laptop, is 30 times more
powerful and 15 times more energy-efficient than