Newer supercomputers favor energy efficiency over raw speed

Supercomputer spending is increasingly focusing on energy efficiency rather than raw performance, the latest edition of the Top500 list of the world's most powerful computers suggests.

There's no change at the top, with China's 33.86 petaflop/s Tianhe-2 in the lead for the sixth consecutive time.

In fact, there are only two changes to the top 10. Trinity, built by Cray for the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories, jumped straight in at sixth place, while another Cray machine climbed up the rankings to eighth place. Hazel-Hen, at Germany's Höchstleistungsrechenzentrum Stuttgart (HLRS), now has double the number of cores it had six months ago, when it was known as Hornet and held 23rd place.

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