The Fujitsu system will give a supercomputing center in Japan a peak performance of 1.13 petaflops when it begins operating in 2012.
Fujitsu officials, a week after
unveiling their commercial PrimeHPC FX10 supercomputer, are saying that the
company has now received its first order for the massive system.
Fujitsu announced Nov. 14 that the
Supercomputing Division of Information Technology Center for the University of
Tokyo (SCD/ITC) has ordered the
PrimeHPC FX10, a system comprising primarily all
Fujitsu technology that officials said will have a theoretical peak performance
of 1.13 petaflops (quadrillion floating point operations per second).
The supercomputer, which will begin
operations in April 2012, will be used for a variety of workloads at the
university, both in education and research. In addition, corporations also will
have access to the system. The 46-year-old supercomputing institution is used
by more than 1,500 researchers who come inside and outside the university.
Fujitsu put Japan back at the top of the
supercomputer world in June, when its K Computer reached No. 1 on the Top500
list of the world's most powerful systems. The K Computer, a one-time
supercomputer operating at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational
Science in Kobe, was the first Japanese system to top the list since Fujitsu's
Earth Simulator was dethroned in 2004. The K Computer has a peak performance of
more than 8.1 petaflops.
Now Fujitsu officials are looking to
leverage what they learned with the K Computer to create the PrimeHPC FX10,
which they plan to sell commercially. The company expects to sell about 50 of
the systems over the next three years both in Japan and in other regions,
starting with the supercomputer heading to the SCD/ITC.
The supercomputer will combine high
performance and scalability with significant energy efficiency, according to
Fujitsu.
The system, which the company says will
be able to reach a theoretical peak performance of 23.3 petaflops, is made up
of Fujitsu technology, including its newest SPARC64 chip, the 16-core SPARC64
IXfx, an unusual occurrence in a field dominated by systems powered by
x86-based chips from the likes of Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
The PrimeHPC FX10 also includes
Fujitsu's Tofu interconnect technology that offers high memory, bandwidth and
scalability, the company's own Technical Computing Suite of high-performance
computing (HPC) middleware and VisImpact technology, which enables users to
create a hybrid parallel programming model that combines threads with Message
Passing Interface.
The supercomputer at the SCD/ITC will
comprise 4,800 computing nodes over 50 racks, 74 Fujitsu Primergy servers and
234 Fujitsu Eternus storage systems. It will have a memory capacity of 150
terabytes.
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