UT’s supercomputer, Beacon, may not be the fastest but it is the greenest. It was listed at the top of the Green500 which ranks the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world. For decades, the notion of “performance” has been synonymous with “speed” (as measured in FLOPS, short for floating-point operations per second). This particular focus has led to “the emergence of supercomputers that consume egregious amounts of electrical power and produce so much heat that extravagant cooling facilities must be constructed to ensure proper operation” according to the list. It stated that UT’s National Institute for Computational Sciences’ Beacon system has set the new energy efficiency bar at nearly two-and-a-half billion floating-point operations per second (gigaflops) per watt. To read more about the ranking, visit the Green500 website. To read more about NICS collaboration with Intel, visit Intel’s website.