Fujitsu Receives Order From Nagoya University for HPC

Fujitsu Ltd has received an order from Nagoya University’s Information
Technology Center for a supercomputer for academic research.

According to Fujitsu, the system will have a hybrid configuration, composed of
a Fujitsu Supercomputer PRIMEHPC FX10 and an HPC cluster comprised of Fujitsu
Server PRIMERGY CX400. At deployment, it will have a theoretical peak
performance of 561.4 teraflops, and will be scaled up in the future to 3,662.5
teraflops.

"The new system is due to start running
from October 2013 and will be used for advanced research and academic purposes
at Nagoya University’s Information Technology Center," the company said.

The new system consolidates the Information Technology Center’s three existing
systems: the supercomputer system, application server, and
information-academics platform. It was designed to meet demands for more
computing capacity, to make computing resources in other academic areas, to
create new computational services, and to help educate people who will reach
into new areas of inquiry.

Fujitsu’s concept for the system was that of a hybrid, specifically, the
combination of a PRIMEHPC FX10 and a cluster-type supercomputer comprised of PRIMERGY
CX400 servers. The PRIMEHPC FX10 should act as a bridge to exa-scale computing,
performing as a computing resource under the auspices of the Ministry of
Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology’s HPC Infrastructure. As
for the HPC cluster with Intel CPUs, it can run a range of ISV applications and
free-software projects.

In its initial configuration, the new system will comprise 384
PRIMEHPC FX10 nodes and 552 PRIMERGY CX400 nodes, which have a theoretical
performance of 561.4 teraflops. In the future, it will be scaled up to 3,662.5
teraflops.

The PRIMERGYCX400 server is an x86 server suitable for HPC applications that
allows high-density mounting, with 84 nodes per rack, roughly double a typical
1U server. Of the 552 nodes that this system uses, 184 are equipped with Intel
Xeon Phi Coprocessors, for performance at low cost and low power
consumption. This system also employs ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation software which
enables the aggregation of multiple nodes as a virtual single large compute
node.

"As part of HPC middleware, the system is
being rolled out together with the Technical Computing Suite for peta-scale
system support. The system has a total of 6PB of storage, configured using
the distributed FEFS file system for capacity and performance," the company
added.

Prof. Yoshito Itoh, director of the Information Technology Center at Nagoya
University, said: "As a shared
resource available for use nationwide, a home for joint research, and a
resource-providing institution in the HPCI, Nagoya University’s Information
Technology Center chose to deploy the PRIMEHPC FX10, with high computing
performance and energy efficiency, and the PRIMERGY CX400, with multi-core
processors, to accelerate the use of high-performance computing in more and
more fields, from initial-stage research to large-scale studies and industrial
applications. It can be expected to expand and invigorate the
computational-science community, which includes the next generation of
researchers, and return benefits to society through scientific results.

"The new
system will also comprehensively support large-scale simulations using massive
storage systems and giant 3D screen virtual-reality systems. Additionally,
planned system upgrades will bring sought after computational services along
with even better energy efficiency."