Fujitsu's supercomputing MONSTER thrashes Top 500 rivals
Posted: Fri Mar 16, 2012 3:08 pm
The Register
That is damn impressive!Fujitsu's K computer has confirmed its place as emperor of the Top 500 supercomputer list with a ball-breaking 10.51 petaflops.
The K computer – named by Fujitsu and its original development partners, Hitachi and NEC, after the Japanese word for 1016, "Kei" – was conceived in 2006. Detailed design took place from 2007 to 2009, when manufacturing started, with the system being delivered in stages. Performance tuning started this year, with an 8.126 Pflop rating in June. Full service is scheduled to start in November.
The petaflop number has just increased by 29 per cent, which solidly cements the K computer's place at the top of the SuperComputer Top500 list. The second system is a 2.566 Pflop Tianhe-1A supercomputer at the Chinese National Supercomputing Centre in Tianjin, made by NUDT. Third is a Cray Jaguar at the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory, rated at 1.759 PfLops.
The numbers involved are bizarrely large. The K computer has 17.6PB of storage, mostly Fujitsu Eternus arrays. There are 864 racks, housing 88,128 SPARC64 VIIIfx processors: each one a node in the system. Each processor has 8 cores, running at 12Gflops and 2GHz, connected by a Tofu 6D mesh torus interconnect that can support more than 100,000 nodes. That means a grand total of 705,024 cores. This baby is a monster.