Fujitsu Announces Start of Operations for Japan’s Fastest Supercomputer

Fujitsu
Announces Start of Operations for Japan’s Fastest Supercomputer

Supercomputer is operated by JCAHPC, which is
a jointly run by the University of Tokyo and the University of Tsukuba

TOKYO, Dec 1, 2016 –
(JCN Newswire) – Fujitsu today announced the completion of the Oakforest-PACS
supercomputer at the Joint Center for Advanced High Performance Computing
(JCAHPC), which is jointly run by the University of Tokyo and the University of
Tsukuba, and that operations have commenced today.

This new supercomputer is comprised of FUJITSU
Server PRIMERGY CX600 M1 x86 servers. It uses Intel Xeon Phi processors in its
8,208 computation nodes, achieving a total theoretical computational
performance of 25 petaflops(1). Using performance tuning technologies from
Fujitsu and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. aimed at large-scale, high performance
computing to draw out the maximum system performance, the system achieved 13.55
petaflops on the LINPACK(2) benchmark used to show supercomputer performance on
the TOP500 rankings, placing it first in Japan and sixth in the world. It also
achieved 385.5 teraflops(3) on the HPCG (High Performance Conjugate Gradient)
benchmark(4), which is known to be a performance indicator closer to actual
application performance, placing it third in the world.

Fujitsu will be supporting Oakforest-PACS, which
will contribute to the development of science and technology across all of
Japan on the basis of Japan’s first joint operation by two universities.

Under the operation of JCAHPC, Oakforest-PACS
will not only promote research and development in a variety of next-generation
science and technology fields, but will also contribute to human resource
development in the computational science and high performance computing fields,
which will play key roles in the future. Fujitsu is involved in the two
universities’ activities, providing total support for various research,
development, and analysis operations, through its broad product lineup, strong
service structure, and experience accumulated over 40 years of high performance
computing.

Fujitsu will continue to work on developing the
world’s top-level supercomputers, providing even faster and higher performance
systems.

Oakforest-PACS Specifications

(1) Petaflops 
Short for peta floating point operations per
second. Peta is an SI prefix indicating one quadrillion, or 1015, so this
indicates one quadrillion floating point operations per second.
(2) LINPACK 
A program developed by J. Dongarra, Ph.D., of
the University of Tennessee, for solving a system of linear equations using
matrix computation. It is the benchmark program used to create the TOP500 list,
which ranks the performance of the world’s supercomputers. 
(3) Teraflops 
Short for tera floating point operations per
second. Tera is an SI prefix indicating one billion, or 1012, so this indicates
one billion floating point operations per second. 
(4) HPCG (High Performance Conjugate Gradient)
benchmark 
An international ranking of processing speed
with the conjugate gradient method used in industry and other actual
applications.