Japan Secures HPC Dominance (For Now)

April 06, 2012

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Japan is steadily securing their supercomputing prominence as HPC sites across the country begin building systems that are compatible with the Riken Institute's "K" supercomputer — currently the world's fastest supercomputer at 10.5 petaflops of peak performance.

Kyushu University has recently placed an order with Fujitsu for a big hybrid Sparc-x86 cluster that could work in tandem with the K supercomputer. Their yet-to-be nicknamed hybrid cluster will be capable of roughly 691 teraflops across the Sparc and Xeon nodes.

The university, which is the dominant educational institution in southern Japan, has a lot of HPC power already. They have a PrimeQuest Itanium cluster rated at 10.9 teraflops and Primergy RX200 S6 rack server cluster with 4,704 Xeon cores that is rated at 50.2 teraflops.

There are plans later in the year to add some GPU coprocessors to their new hybrid cluster, which will most likely push the new system into the petaflop range and onto the Top 500 supercomputer list in the fall.

According to Mutsumi Aoyagi, director of the Research Institute for Information Technology at the University, the new system will include a visualization server with remote screen sharing, high-capacity memory, and a variety of visualization tools for pre- and post-processing of massive volumes of data.

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