Japan operates a number of centers for supercomputing which hold world records in speed, with the K computer being the world's fastest from June 2011 to June 2012, [1] [2] [3] and Fugaku holding the lead from June 2020 until June 2022.
The K computer's performance was impressive, according to professor Jack Dongarra who maintains the TOP500 list of supercomputers, and it surpassed its next 5 competitors combined. [1] The K computer cost US$10 million a year to operate. [1]
Japan's entry into supercomputing began in the early 1980s. In 1982, Osaka University's LINKS-1 Computer Graphics System used a massively parallel processing architecture, with 514 microprocessors, including 257 Zilog Z8001 control processors and 257 iAPX 86/20 (the pairing of an 8086 with an 8087 FPU) floating-point processors. It was mainly used for rendering realistic 3D computer graphics. [4] It was claimed by the designers to be the world's most powerful computer, as of 1984. [5]
The SX-3 supercomputer family was developed by NEC Corporation and announced in April 1989. [6] The SX-3/44R became the fastest supercomputer in the world in 1990. Fujitsu's Numerical Wind Tunnel supercomputer gained the top spot in 1993. Except for the Sandia National Laboratories' win in June 1994, Japanese supercomputers continued to top the TOP500 lists up until 1997. [7]
The K computer's placement on the top spot was seven years after Japan held the title in 2004. [1] [2] NEC's Earth Simulator supercomputer built by NEC at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) was the fastest in the world at that time. It used 5,120 NEC SX-6i processors, generating a performance of 28,293,540 MIPS (million instructions per second). [8] It also had a peak performance of 131 TFLOPS (131 trillion floating-point operations per second), using proprietary vector processing chips.
The K computer used over 60,000 commercial scalar SPARC64 VIIIfx processors housed in over 600 cabinets. The fact that K computer was over 60 times faster than the Earth Simulator, and that the Earth Simulator ranked as the 68th system in the world 7 years after holding the top spot, demonstrates both the rapid increase in top performance in Japan and the widespread growth of supercomputing technology worldwide.
| Top speed (TFLOPS) | Country | Number of computers in TOP500 |
|---|---|---|
| 33860 |  China | 61 |
| 22998 |  Netherlands | 31 |
| 17590 |  United States | 25 |
| 8162 |  Japan | 26 |
| 1050 |  France | 25 |
| 826 |  Germany | 30 |
| 350 |  Russia | 12 |
| 275 |  United Kingdom | 27 |
The GSIC Center at the Tokyo Institute of Technology houses the Tsubame 2.0 supercomputer, which has a peak of 2,288 TFLOPS and in June 2011 ranked 5th in the world. [9] It was developed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in collaboration with NEC and HP, and has 1,400 nodes using both HP Proliant and NVIDIA Tesla processors. [10]
The RIKEN MDGRAPE-3 for molecular dynamics simulations of proteins is a special purpose petascale supercomputer at the Advanced Center for Computing and Communication, RIKEN in Wakō, Saitama, just outside Tokyo. It uses over 4,800 custom MDGRAPE-3 chips, as well as Intel Xeon processors. [11] However, given that it is a special purpose computer, it can not appear on the TOP500 list which requires Linpack benchmarking.
The next significant system is Japan Atomic Energy Agency's PRIMERGY BX900 Fujitsu supercomputer. It is significantly slower, reaching 200 TFLOPS and ranking as the 38th in the world in 2011. [12] [13]
Historically, the Gravity Pipe (GRAPE) system for astrophysics at the University of Tokyo was distinguished not by its top speed of 64 Tflops, but by its cost and energy efficiency, having won the Gordon Bell Prize in 1999, at about $7 per megaflops, using special purpose processing elements. [14]
DEGIMA is a highly cost and energy-efficient computer cluster at the Nagasaki Advanced Computing Center, Nagasaki University. It is used for hierarchical N-body simulations and has a peak performance of 111 TFLOPS with an energy efficiency of 1376 MFLOPS/watt. The overall cost of the hardware was approximately US$500,000. [15] [16]
The Computational Simulation Centre, International Fusion Energy Research Centre of the ITER Broader Approach [17] /Japan Atomic Energy Agency operates a 1.52 PFLOPS supercomputer (currently operating at 442 TFLOPS) in Rokkasho, Aomori. The system, called Helios (Roku-chan in Japanese), consists of 4,410 Groupe Bull bullx B510 compute blades, and is used for fusion simulation projects.
The University of Tokyo's Information Technology Center in Kashiwa, Chiba, began operating Oakleaf-FX in April 2012. This supercomputer is a Fujitsu PRIMEHPC FX10 (a commercial version of the K computer) configured with 4,800 compute nodes for a peak performance of 1.13 PFLOPS. Each of the compute nodes is a SPARC64 IXfx processor connected to other nodes via a six-dimensional mesh/torus interconnect. [18]
In June 2012, the Numerical Prediction Division, Forecast Department of the Japan Meteorological Agency deployed an 847 TFLOPS Hitachi SR16000/M1 supercomputer, which is based on the IBM Power 775, at the Office of Computer Systems Operations and the Meteorological Satellite Center in Kiyose, Tokyo. [19] The system consists of two SR16000/M1s, each a cluster of 432-logical nodes. Each node consists of four 3.83 GHz IBM POWER7 processors and 128 GB of memory. The system is used to run a high-resolution (2 km horizontally and 60 layers vertically, up to 9-hour forecast) local weather forecast model every hour.
Starting in 2003, Japan used grid computing in the National Research Grid Initiative (NAREGI) project to develop high-performance, scalable grids over very high-speed networks as a future computational infrastructure for scientific and engineering research. [20]
A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2022, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 1018 FLOPS, so called exascale supercomputers. For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.
Floating point operations per second is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations.
The Earth Simulator (ES) is a series of supercomputers deployed at Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology Yokohama Institute of Earth Sciences.
Blue Gene was an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with relatively low power consumption.
ASCI Red was the first computer built under the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), the supercomputing initiative of the United States government created to help the maintenance of the United States nuclear arsenal after the 1992 moratorium on nuclear testing.
NEC SX describes a series of vector supercomputers designed, manufactured, and marketed by NEC. This computer series is notable for providing the first computer to exceed 1 gigaflop, as well as the fastest supercomputer in the world between 1992–1993, and 2002–2004. The current model, as of 2018, is the SX-Aurora TSUBASA.
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL benchmarks, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.
In computing, performance per watt is a measure of the energy efficiency of a particular computer architecture or computer hardware. Literally, it measures the rate of computation that can be delivered by a computer for every watt of power consumed. This rate is typically measured by performance on the LINPACK benchmark when trying to compare between computing systems: an example using this is the Green500 list of supercomputers. Performance per watt has been suggested to be a more sustainable measure of computing than Moore's Law.
IBM Sequoia was a petascale Blue Gene/Q supercomputer constructed by IBM for the National Nuclear Security Administration as part of the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC). It was delivered to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 2011 and was fully deployed in June 2012. Sequoia was dismantled in 2020, its last position on the top500.org list was #22 in the November 2019 list.
QPACE is a massively parallel and scalable supercomputer designed for applications in lattice quantum chromodynamics.
Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least 1018 IEEE 754 Double Precision (64-bit) operations (multiplications and/or additions) per second (exaFLOPS)"; it is a measure of supercomputer performance.
The K computer – named for the Japanese word/numeral "kei" (京), meaning 10 quadrillion (1016) – was a supercomputer manufactured by Fujitsu, installed at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. The K computer was based on a distributed memory architecture with over 80,000 compute nodes. It was used for a variety of applications, including climate research, disaster prevention and medical research. The K computer's operating system was based on the Linux kernel, with additional drivers designed to make use of the computer's hardware.
Tsubame is a series of supercomputers that operates at the GSIC Center at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan, designed by Satoshi Matsuoka.
The history of supercomputing goes back to the 1960s when a series of computers at Control Data Corporation (CDC) were designed by Seymour Cray to use innovative designs and parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance. The CDC 6600, released in 1964, is generally considered the first supercomputer. However, some earlier computers were considered supercomputers for their day such as the 1954 IBM NORC in the 1950s, and in the early 1960s, the UNIVAC LARC (1960), the IBM 7030 Stretch (1962), and the Manchester Atlas (1962), all of which were of comparable power.
Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.
Approaches to supercomputer architecture have taken dramatic turns since the earliest systems were introduced in the 1960s. Early supercomputer architectures pioneered by Seymour Cray relied on compact innovative designs and local parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance. However, in time the demand for increased computational power ushered in the age of massively parallel systems.
The PRIMEHPC FX10 is a supercomputer designed and manufactured by Fujitsu. Announced on 7 November 2011 at the Supercomputing Conference, the PRIMEHPC FX10 is an improved and commercialized version of the K computer, which was the first supercomputer to obtain more than 10 PFLOPS on the LINPACK benchmark. In its largest configuration, the PRIMEHPC FX10 has a peak performance 23.2 PFLOPS, power consumption of 22.4 MW, and a list price of US$655.4 million. It was succeeded by the PRIMEHPC FX100 with SPARC64 XIfx processors in 2015.
The Cray XC40 is a massively parallel multiprocessor supercomputer manufactured by Cray. It consists of Intel Haswell Xeon processors, with optional Nvidia Tesla or Intel Xeon Phi accelerators, connected together by Cray's proprietary "Aries" interconnect, stored in air-cooled or liquid-cooled cabinets. The XC series supercomputers are available with the Cray DataWarp applications I/O accelerator technology.
The Sunway BlueLight (神威蓝光) is a Chinese massively parallel supercomputer. It is the first publicly announced PFLOPS supercomputer using Sunway processors solely developed by the People's Republic of China.
Fugaku(Japanese: 富岳) is a petascale supercomputer at the Riken Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan. It started development in 2014 as the successor to the K computer and made its debut in 2020. It is named after an alternative name for Mount Fuji.