Feng noted that by the end of the next decade, if system designs continue on their current trajectory, the cutting-edge supercomputer will consume a gigawatt, or 1 billion watts, of power. In contrast, the entire state of New York .

The list is updated twice a year. Participation is voluntary, and rankings are based on how many floating-point operations are executed per watt of electricity. Only those computers placing in the Top500 are considered for the list.

This latest iteration of the test of GPUs (graphics processing units) as a relatively low-power way to add more computing power. Four of the top 10 entries on the list, for example, use Nvidia GPUs, which would have been unheard of a few years ago.

IBM's Blue Gene/Q did not incorporate GPUs another type of accelerator card, the IBM PowerXCell-based accelerator.

"2010 could be seen as being the year of the accelerator," Feng said. "It's an alternative computing platform that maps well to various tasks. The side benefit, which is very important, is that they happen to be energy-efficient."