Supercomputing in Japan

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The Earth Simulator in Yokohama was the world's fastest supercomputer in 2004, but 7 years later the K computer in Kobe became over 60 times faster. Earth simulator ES2.jpg
The Earth Simulator in Yokohama was the world's fastest supercomputer in 2004, but 7 years later the K computer in Kobe became over 60 times faster.

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.

Contents

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]

Previous records

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.

Supercomputing centers

Comparison (June 2011) [7]
Top speed
(TFLOPS)
CountryNumber of
computers
in TOP500
22998Flag of the Netherlands.svg  Netherlands 31
17590Flag of the United States.svg  United States 25
33860Flag of the People's Republic of China.svg  China 61
8162Flag of Japan.svg  Japan 26
1050Flag of France.svg  France 25
826Flag of Germany.svg  Germany 30
350Flag of Russia.svg  Russia 12
275Flag of the United Kingdom.svg  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.

Grid computing

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]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Supercomputer</span> Type of extremely powerful computer

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 2017, supercomputers have existed, which can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS). 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.

In computing, floating point operations per second is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measure than measuring instructions per second.

The Earth Simulator (ES) is a series of supercomputers deployed at Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology Yokohama Institute of Earth Sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM Blue Gene</span> Series of supercomputers by IBM

Blue Gene was an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ASCI Red</span> Supercomputer

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NEC SX</span>

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TOP500</span> Database project devoted to the ranking of computers

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sequoia (supercomputer)</span> IBM supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

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.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">K computer</span> Supercomputer in Kobe, Japan

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Computer Center for Higher Education (France)</span>

The National Computer Center for Higher Education, based in Montpellier, is a public institution under the supervision of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research (MESR) created by a decree issued in 1999. CINES offers IT services for public research in France. It is one of the major national centers for computing power supply for research in France.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tsubame (supercomputer)</span> Series of supercomputers

Tsubame is a series of supercomputers that operates at the GSIC Center at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan, designed by Satoshi Matsuoka.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of supercomputing</span>

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Supercomputing in Europe</span> Overview of supercomputing in Europe

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.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cray XC40</span> Supercomputer manufactured by Cray

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fugaku (supercomputer)</span> Japanese supercomputer

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.

The A64FX is a 64-bit ARM architecture microprocessor designed by Fujitsu. The processor is replacing the SPARC64 V as Fujitsu's processor for supercomputer applications. It powers the Fugaku supercomputer, ranked in the TOP500 as the fastest supercomputer in the world from June 2020, until falling to second place behind Frontier in June 2022.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Japanese supercomputer 'K' is world's fastest". The Telegraph. 20 June 2011. Retrieved 20 June 2011.
  2. 1 2 "Japanese 'K' Computer Is Ranked Most Powerful". The New York Times. 20 June 2011. Retrieved 20 June 2011.
  3. "Supercomputer "K computer" Takes First Place in World". Fujitsu. Retrieved 20 June 2011.
  4. "LINKS-1 Computer Graphics System-Computer Museum".
  5. http://www.vasulka.org/archive/Writings/VideogameImpact.pdf#page=29 [ bare URL PDF ]
  6. Computing methods in applied sciences and engineering by R. Glowinski, A. Lichnewsky ISBN   0-89871-264-5 page 353-360
  7. 1 2 "TOP500 List – June 2011". TOP500 . Retrieved 22 June 2011.
  8. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 9 October 2014. Retrieved 16 September 2014.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  9. HPCWire May 2011 Archived 8 May 2011 at the Wayback Machine
  10. Hui Pan 'Research Initiatives with HP Servers', Gigabit/ATM Newsletter, December 2010, page 11
  11. Carey, Bjorn (2006), "Overachievers We Love – Faster", Popular Science 269 (6)
  12. TOP500
  13. TOP500 ranking Archived 2 December 2010 at the Wayback Machine
  14. J Makino, Specialized Hardware for Supercomputing, SciDAC Review, Issue 12 (Spring 2009), IOP. 2009
  15. The Green500 June 2011 Archived 3 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine Environmentally Responsible Supercomputing, The Green500 List
  16. 190 TFlops Astrophysical N-body Simulation on a Cluster of GPUs by T. Hamada, T. et al in: High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC), 2010 International Conference, New Orleans, LA, 13–19 Nov. 2010, pages 1 – 9
  17. ITER Broader Approach
  18. Information Technology Center, The University of Tokyo (14 November 2011). "Fujitsu's PRIMEHPC FX10 with 1.13 PFLOPS starts operation at the University of Tokyo in April 2012" (PDF). Retrieved 5 February 2012.
  19. 新しいスーパーコンピュータシステムの運用開始について 24 May 2012
  20. S. Matsuokaet; et al. (March 2005). "Japanese Computational Grid Research Project: NAREGI". Proceedings of the IEEE. 93 (3): 522–533. doi:10.1109/JPROC.2004.842748. S2CID   22562197.