For reference, Roadrunner, which was the first petascale system in 2008, used 2.35 MW (according to Wikipedia). So this one gives us 1,000 times the performance for 10 times the energy. From a performance/Watt perspective, this is an impressive improvement.
EDIT: Wikipedia also says Roadrunner was not considered power-efficient in its day, which led to it being decommissioned after only five years of operation.
That, and the apps teams hated the architecture given very poor tooling support - especially since the writing was on the wall that the future was GPGPU accelerators and the Cell was a dead end. The roadrunner processors were awesome on paper, but not so much when it came to working with them. Kind of a shame really: there were some really interesting ideas in that processor design.
This is the first I have noticed them reporting power draw. It seems immoral to run it for anything that doesn't help stop global climate catastrophe. (Presumably global thermonuclear war would suffice. But carbon capture afterward would be hard to arrange for.)
Wondering if they measure while benchmarking, or add up max power ratings of the chips.
Did any old mainframe ever burn like that? E.g. the first big USAF missile tracking system, the one that filled four floors of a custom building?
Using the secret skill of "clicking on the links for the other lists" I discovered that the first TOP500 which had a machine report a power draw was the TOP10 in November 1996: https://top500.org/lists/top500/1996/11/
(498 kW for 229 GFlops. 136,317 times more power draw per flops than the current leader on the Green500.)
Anybody not boggled over the idea of their program burning 21 MW for as long as it runs either can never be impressed with anything, or has no head for numbers. Computation demanding power that could hurl a fully loaded jumbo jet into the sky is not something most of us will ever code.
Many who have worked at AWS, Meta, Google, Apple, or Microsoft have had access to resources on that scale. That's hundreds of thousands of engineers by now, if not millions. You may be right that it's not most, but it's not rare either. And I personally think that running a supercluster for atmospheric modeling or whatever they intend to do with this thing is an ethically OK application of energy compared to hosting Cow Clicker or whatever.
EDIT: Wikipedia also says Roadrunner was not considered power-efficient in its day, which led to it being decommissioned after only five years of operation.