Update 12/4/2019: RIKEN reported that on December 3rd, the first set of six racks for the supercomputer Fugaku arrived safely at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science, where they will be installed.

The shipment arrived in a specially decorated truck of Fujitsu IT Products, which is in charge of the construction of the system. Installation of the approximately 400 racks, each containing 384 nodes, is scheduled to be completed by June 2020, and then following the connection of the system to peripheral devices, it is scheduled to be opened for public use around 2021. The new supercomputer will be used to find solutions to social issues and cutting-edge research, such as in drug development and the creation of a safer society through disaster prevention and mitigation.

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TOKYO, Dec 2, 2019 — Fujitsu Limited has announced that it began shipping the supercomputer Fugaku, which is jointly developed with RIKEN and promoted by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology with the aim of starting general operation between 2021 and 2022. The first machine to be shipped this time is one of the computer units of Fugaku, a supercomputer system comprised of over 150,000 high-performance CPUs connected together. Fujitsu will continue to deliver the units to RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan, for installation and tuning.

By developing Fugaku, Fujitsu has accumulated various technologies and know-how, including cutting-edge development, system integration, simulation, and AI. Utilizing its supercomputing technologies, Fujitsu is contributing to resolve social issues, promote innovative research, apply such technologies in DX (Digital Transformation), and enhance its industrial competitiveness, including new drug development and the realization of a safe society through disaster prevention and mitigation.

The supercomputer Fugaku is a very large system, in which more than 150,000 high-performance CPUs A64FX(1) developed by Fujitsu based on the Arm instruction set architecture are connected by a high-speed network Tofu Interconnect D(2). In pursuit of superior performance and high reliability, Fujitsu has concentrated its advanced technologies and developed the supercomputer together with RIKEN.

Fugaku is manufactured by Fujitsu IT Products Ltd., and the units, to be shipped for the first time on December 2, will be delivered to RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan.

Fugaku has been developed with the aim of achieving up to 100 times the application performance of the K computer with approximately 3 times the power consumption. With the highest energy-efficiency in the world, a prototype of the system received the No.1 position in Green500(3) at SC19, the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, held in Denver, U.S., from November 17 to November 22.

Fujitsu will continue to deliver computer units of Fugaku and carry out installation and tuning in preparation for the start of general operation between 2021 and 2022. At the same time, by globally providing the commercial Fujitsu Supercomputer PRIMEHPC FX1000 and PRIMEHPC FX700 that the company has developed by utilizing the technology of Fugaku, Fujitsu will promote solutions to social issues and cutting-edge research, such as in drug development and the realization of a safe society through disaster prevention and mitigation. Fujitsu will also provide these products to a wide range of customers in a variety of industries, thereby contributing to the application of these products to the DX field and strengthening corporate competitiveness.

(1) High-performance CPUs A64FX The world’s first CPU adopting Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) which is an extension of the Arm v8-A architecture for supercomputers. Developed by Fujitsu, A64FX has inherited the high performance and low power consumption CPU design the company has cultivated over the years. It realizes high performance per unit of power, high memory bandwidth by adopting HBM2 (High Bandwidth Memory), which is a high performance stacked memory. A64FX can also cope with the half-precision operation and integer dot product operation which are important in deep learning, etc., and are expected to expand its application in the field of AI.
(2) Tofu Interconnect D A network that connects nodes directly at low latency and high bandwidth (6.8 GB/s per link). Large-scale systems of up to about 390,000 nodes can be constructed by 6-dimensional mesh torus connection. It was developed by improving the function of Tofu Interconnect developed for K computer.
(3) Received the No.1 position in Green500 Presented at SC19 on November 18, the Green500 ranks the world’s top 500 fastest computing supercomputers by power consumption and efficiency among the TOP500 supercomputers. The performance measurement of the award-winning system demonstrated that Fugaku technologies have the world’s highest energy efficiency, achieving 1.9995 PFLOPS (petaflops) in calculation speed for simultaneous linear equations (LINPACK) against 2.3593 PFLOPS in a peak performance, and 16.876 GFLOPS/W (gigaflops per watt) in a performance per 1 watt of power consumption.

About Fujitsu Ltd

Fujitsu is the leading Japanese information and communication technology (ICT) company, offering a full range of technology products, solutions, and services. Approximately 132,000 Fujitsu people support customers in more than 100 countries. We use our experience and the power of ICT to shape the future of society with our customers. Fujitsu Limited (Code: 6702) reported consolidated revenues of 4.0 trillion yen (US $36 billion) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2019. For more information, please see www.fujitsu.com.

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Source: Fujitsu Ltd