Japan's first world-class 2.4 petaflops system "Petakon" will begin operation in the fall

May 25 -- The Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) announced that the TSUBAME 2.0 supercomputer, a green, cloud-based supercomputer system, will begin operation in the fall. NEC Corporation (NEC) and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have been selected to design the system.

TSUBAME 1.0, TSUBAME 2.0's predecessor, has supported the development of a variety of industrial and academic research projects in Japan and abroad for over four years. The Tokyo Institute of Technology's Global Scientific Information Center (GSIC) has taken advantage of the high performance scientific computing ability of the TSUBAME 1.0 HPC system for studying domestic and foreign computer systems for nearly two years.

The procurement process concluded on May 25, when the NEC-HP partnership's winning bid was announced. The theoretical maximum performance of the system is 2.4 petaflops, currently the world's fastest, improving by 30 times the performance of TSUBAME 1.0. The new supercomputer will be 12 times faster than Japan's current fastest, which is operated by Japan's National Atomic Energy Agency.

TSUBAME 2.0 will use GPGPU computing and will have a large solid-state drive (SSD). The system should achieve a top ranking on the TOP500 list. More importantly, the system should achieve a high placement on the DARPA HPC Challenge benchmark and on the Green 500 list. Groups which have achieved the best performance in scientific progress are given the recognition of the ACM Gordon Bell Prize.

The Tokyo Institute of Technology plans to provide advanced research training to its students as well as limited computing power to a small number of users. TSUBAME 1.0 provided world-class supercomputer power to many users in the industrial and academic communities, advancing science and technology goals.

The TSUBAME 2.0 supercomputer is equipped with cutting-edge technologies such as the latest Intel Westmere-EP and Nehalem-EX processors with "scalar operation," and will employ approximately 4,200 NVIDIA Fermi GPUs. This "mixed scalar-vector architecture" will achieve world-class computing.

The system has more than 1,400 compute nodes and uses Voltaire's QDR InfiniBand network. It uses the latest SSD technology and high-density mixed technology for the world's fastest total data I/O performance at 0.66 terabytes using DataDirect Networks storage technology.

The operating system will be a mix of Linux and Microsoft Windows HPC, and will also use virtual machine technology in order to take advantage of the flexibility of cloud hosting services.

NEC and HP collaborated with the university on the design of the system. Using high-density packaging technology means only 200 square meters of floor space will be necessary. The Strategic Creative Research Promotion Project (CREST), which takes part in the latest ultra low power HPC projects, included power-saving technology, temperature and fine-grained monitoring and control technology, with advanced cooling technology and application of green supercomputing (PUE = 1.277).

On June 16 at 11:00 a.m., the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Global Scientific Information Center will hold a press conference in conference room 2F to announce further technical details about the TSUBAME 2.0 supercomputer.

This announcement was based on a translation of a press release provided by GSIC. The original is available here in Japanese.

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Source: the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center (GSIC) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology