New Japanese Supercomputer Uses Almost No Power

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A supercomputer that runs on 50 watts of power? Crazy talk, you might say…until now. The Tokyo University’s Grape DR may look like a nightmarish thicket of cables, but it may well be the greenest supercomputer ever made.

Comprised of fully 64 pairs of Intel Core i7 chips, and four accelerator chips that drop the power consumption on this beast through the floor, the Grape DR runs, if my math is correct, a whopping 800 gigaflops of operating capacity (each accelerator handles 200 gigaflops, and that total seems a bit underpowered when you consider the current frontrunner is up in the two petaflop range). However, any criticism about the Grape DR’s performance has to be tempered by the fact that this thing uses less juice than your standard light bulb.

I’m not sure what the deal is with all those cables, which have to be a nightmare to manage, but still–underpowered or no, it’s still quite an achievement.