The Japanese built a "green" supercomputer

That is, not green in color, of course, but a device that does much less harm to the environment than supercomputers of similar power. The Japanese reported that their supercomputer will be ready soon, back in June. Shortly thereafter, Grape-DR took the top spot in the Little Green500 List ranking, which is published monthly. By the way, the energy efficiency of the Japanese supercomputer is 815.4 megaflops / W, which is 5% higher than the previous leader's achievement, the IBM system with energy efficiency of 773.38 megaflops / W. Thus, Grape-DR rightfully occupies the first line in the “green” list of supersystems.

The Japanese managed to develop a chip accelerator, which can significantly reduce energy consumption. Without a chip, the computer would consume 150 megaflop / W of power, so the chip can improve system performance by more than five times.
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By the way, 64 pairs of Intel Core i7-920 processors, plus four accelerator chips, are installed in Grape-DR. To assess performance, researchers worked with the Linpack test, which is used to test supercomputers from the Top 500 rating. The Japanese super-computer, according to the developers, will be used exclusively for the needs of astronomy, scientific and engineering computing.

Of course, the fact that super-computers "turn green" is good news, but it is clear that they are not the leaders in environmental pollution among computing devices. Normal PCs and laptops do much more harm to the environment. In addition to electricity consumption, there are other indicators of "environmental friendliness" of the computer, but still the main focus is now on energy consumption. Probably, the creation of such a computer has harmed more than the harm that this super computer will do for the entire time of its work. I once heard that the smaller a computer (laptop, netbook, portable PC), the more harm it causes to the environment. I do not know, however, as far as this information is true.

However, in the modern computer industry, positive changes are already emerging in the “green” area, large and small corporations have long been working on improving production lines, trying to save electricity and use nonetheless not such harmful materials for production (everything is relative, understandable a business). Even Chinese companies that have never suffered from "environmental friendliness" are beginning to position some of the "green" products, for example, motherboards with low power consumption, for the production of which is used recycled materials.

Here is the English-language source , who are interested