An IBM supercomputer is the most energy efficient supercomputer in the world, according to the latest Supercomputing 'Green500 List'. 

A prototype of IBM's next generation Blue Gene/Q supercomputer is #1 on the list.

In a statement IBM said that for every $1 spent on electricity with the largest petascale system on the Green500 list, clients would spend less than $0.40 cents on a system based on IBM Blue Gene/Q and would be 2.5 times more energy efficient.

IBM Blue Gene/Q is scheduled to be deployed in 2012 by two of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) national laboratories, Argonne National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, both of which collaborated closely with IBM on the design of Blue Gene, influencing many aspects of the system's software and hardware.

Columbia University and the University of Edinburgh contributed to Blue Gene/Q's processor chip design. Both institutions plan to use the system to advance quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which is a part of the study of particle physics.  

Meanwhile another vendor to pull good news from the Supercomputer500 was AMD which said its high performance computing offering achieved double digit growth in the total number of systems on the TOP500 list that are based on AMD platforms. More than half of the 68 supercomputers based on AMD technology now feature the 8- and 12-core AMD Opteron 6100 Series processor. 

The company said its  16-core processor codenamed "Interlagos" will add features specifically for HPC and offer the world