From the Editor | Main Blog Index
July 21, 2009
When NEC and Hitachi withdrew from Japan's Next-Generation Supercomputing Project in May, it left Fujitsu as the only system and chip vendor remaining on the project. Originally the idea was to build a 10 petaflop (Linpack) machine using a combination of scalar CPUs from Fujitsu and vector processors from NEC. With NEC's chips off the table, the powers that be -- in this case MEXT, Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and RIKEN, Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research -- decided to go forward with Fujitsu hardware alone.
According to Fujitsu's announcement on July 17, the multi-petaflop system will now be powered by the company's new eight-core SPARC64_VIIIfx processor, codenamed "Venus." That chip was unveiled at about the same time NEC and Hitachi were bailing on the supercomputing project. Although not currently in production, Venus was advertised as the fastest CPU on the planet at 128 gigaflops.
It's doubtful Venus will hold that title when it is deployed in Japan's prototype machine late next year. By 2010 the eight-core Power7 chips should be in the field, and IBM is saying those processors will deliver over 256 gigaflops per CPU. The Power7 will be used in the multi-petaflop "Blue Waters" supercomputer for NCSA, which is scheduled to be running full tilt in 2011. Even Intel's Xeon chips should be well into triple-digit gigaflops when the Westmere 32nm Xeon processors hit the streets in 2010.
What may set Venus apart from its competition is its energy efficiency. Fujitsu is claiming the SPARC64_VIIIfx design allows it to operate at less than one-third the power of current Intel processors. The company didn't specify which Intel parts they were referring to, but since even the high-end Itanium CPUs top out at about 122 watts, the Venus chip should draw no more than 40 watts or so.
Aside from Fujitsu silicon, the next-gen Japanese super will also feature a multidimensional mesh/torus network as well as custom system software to glue it all together. The fact that there will no longer be vector hardware to contend with will undoubtedly make this software simpler than it otherwise would have been.
But there will be some attempt to accommodate applications developed for NEC's SX vector machines. According to the press announcement: "Although the next-generation supercomputer will consist only of scalar units, through the use of application parallelization and tuning it will support applications that have run on previous supercomputers with vector units. Other ways to assist users of vector-based supercomputers are also being considered."
Despite the NEC/Hitachi withdraw, the plan is to get a "partially operational system" by late 2010, and the complete production system ready by 2012.
Posted by Michael Feldman - July 21, 2009 @ 12:33 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
![]()
Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.
No Recent Blog Comments
During a conversation this week with Cray CEO, Peter Ungaro, we learned that the company has managed to extend its reach into the enterprise HPC market quite dramatically--at least in supercomputing business terms. With steady growth into these markets, however, the focus on hardware versus the software side of certain problems for such users is....
Read more...
Contributing commentator, Andrew Jones, offers a break in the news cycle with an assessment of what the national "size matters" contest means for the U.S. and other nations...
Read more...
Today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzing, Germany, Jack Dongarra presented on a proposed benchmark that could carry a bit more weight than its older Linpack companion. The high performance conjugate gradient (HPCG) concept takes into account new architectures for new applications, while shedding the floating point....
Read more...
Jun 19, 2013 |
Supercomputer architectures have evolved considerably over the last 20 years, particularly in the number of processors that are linked together. One aspect of HPC architecture that hasn't changed is the MPI programming model.
Read more...
Jun 18, 2013 |
The world's largest supercomputers, like Tianhe-2, are great at traditional, compute-intensive HPC workloads, such as simulating atomic decay or modeling tornados. But data-intensive applications--such as mining big data sets for connections--is a different sort of workload, and runs best on a different sort of computer.
Read more...
Jun 18, 2013 |
Researchers are finding innovative uses for Gordon, the 285 teraflop supercomputer housed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) that has a unique Flash-based storage system. Since going online, researchers have put the incredibly fast I/O to use on a wide variety of workloads, ranging from chemistry to political science.
Read more...
Jun 17, 2013 |
The advent of low-power mobile processors and cloud delivery models is changing the economics of computing. But just as an economy car is good at different things than a full size truck, an HPC workload still has certain computing demands that neither the fastest smartphone nor the most elastic cloud cluster can fulfill.
Read more...
Jun 14, 2013 |
For all the progress we've made in IT over the last 50 years, there's one area of life that has steadfastly eluded the grasp of computers: understanding human language. Now, researchers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) are utilizing a Hadoop cluster on its Longhorn supercomputer to move the state of the art of language processing a little bit further.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
Join HPCwire Editor Nicole Hemsoth and Dr. David Bader from Georgia Tech as they take center stage on opening night at Atlanta's first Big Data Kick Off Week, filmed in front of a live audience. Nicole and David look at the evolution of HPC, today's big data challenges, discuss real world solutions, and reveal their predictions. Exactly what does the future holds for HPC?
Join our webinar to learn how IT managers can migrate to a more resilient, flexible and scalable solution that grows with the data center. Mellanox VMS is future-proof, efficient and brings significant CAPEX and OPEX savings. The VMS is available today.