New Fujitsu Supercomputer Has 23 Petaflop Potential

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With the SuperComputing 2011 event and semi-annual Top500 list just around the corner, Fujitsu has announced the PRIMEHPC FX10, a commercial version of the technology powering the reigning top supercomputer from the June 2011 rankings, the K computer. Fujitsu said the new FX10 has the potential to create a supercomputer that could far surpass the power of the K system.

23 Quadrillion floating-point operations per second

Fujitsu announced the global availability of the PRIMEHPC FX10 supercomputer, which is capable of scaling to a top theoretical processing performance of 23.2 petaflops (PFLOPS).  Assembled in a 1,024 rack, 98,304 node configuration the supercomputer was developed completely with Fujitsu components.  As an initiative of Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology the system will be compatible with the "K computer" and is being developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu. It will be available worldwide.

With a variety of research applications to be used on Fujitsu hopes the new system will help expedite the academic research and product development of customers throughout the world. Leveraging the FX10 system they hope to make it possible to address societal challenges - including new drug development, disaster prevention, disaster mitigation, and other measures, to bring about a safe and secure society - and to pursue cutting-edge research, such as enabling the development and manufacturing of new materials without the need to make prototypes.

Product Features

PRIMEHPC FX10 features a variety of enhancements for high-performance computing, such as high memory bandwidth, scalable "Tofu" interconnects with 10 links, each delivering high performance levels of bidirectional 5 GB per second.  The new system will run on the recently released SPARC64 IXfx processors, which Fujitsu developed with 16 cores, 12MB shared L2 cache and have a power efficiency of more than 2 gigaflops per watt. Total system memory can scale from 12 Terabytes to over 6 Petabytes.  Fujitsu's proprietary Technical Computing Suite HPC middleware combined with their high-performance distributed file system, FEFS, enables sharing across 100,000 nodes.

Fujitsu expects to start shipping the PRIMEHPC FX10 systems in January 2012.