Japan's top supercomputer unveiled

2010-03-04
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Japan's fastest supercomputer has become operational and will be used by scientists for wide-ranging applications in atomic energy research, including simulated nuclear fusion.

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Japan's fastest supercomputer has become operational and will be used by scientists for wide-ranging applications in atomic energy research, including simulated nuclear fusion.

Developed jointly by Fujitsu and Japan Atomic Energy Agency, the new system delivered a computing performance of 186.1 teraflops on the LINPACK benchmark, putting it on top of the latest list of the country's best 500 supercomputers.

It consists of three different computational server systems that have different functions, but all run Fujitsu's high-performance middleware, Parallelnavi, which provides delivers a common development and execution environment and unified operations management.

At the core of the system is the Large-scale Parallel Computation Unit, which provides a high-power parallel computing environment using Fujitsu's latest blade server, PRIMERGY BX900, in a configuration of 2,134 nodes (4,268 CPUs, 17,072 cores) connected using the latest InfiniBand QDR high-speed interconnect technology.

The Application Development Unit for next-generation code development uses 300-node FX1 server cluster, while a shared memory server uses a single-node SPARC Enterprise M9000 UNIX server. There is also a 36-unit ETERNUS DX80 disk array storage system.

It is hoped that the supercomputer will play a key role in ensuring the safe use of atomic energy.

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