Today Cray and Fujitsu announced a partnership to offer high performance technologies for the exascale era. Under the alliance agreement, Cray is developing the first-ever commercial supercomputer powered by the Fujitsu A64FX Arm-based processor with high-bandwidth memory and supported on the proven Cray CS500 supercomputer architecture and programming environment.
Our partnership with Fujitsu means customers now have a broader choice of processor technology to address their pressing computational needs,” said Fred Kohout, senior vice president and CMO at Cray, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. “We are delivering the development-to-deployment experience customers have come to expect from Cray, including exploratory development to the Cray Programming Environment (CPE) for Arm processors to optimize performance and scalability with additional support for Scalable Vector Extensions and high bandwidth memory.”
Initial customers include Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, RIKEN Center for Computational Science, Stony Brook University, and University of Bristol. As part of this new partnership, Cray and Fujitsu will explore engineering collaboration, co-development, and joint go-to-market in an effort to meet customer demand in the supercomputing space.
The most demanding computing work at LANL involves sparse, irregular, multi-physics, multi-link-scale, highly resolved, long running 3D simulations,” said Gary Grider, deputy division leader, HPC division at LANL. “There are few existing architectures that currently serve this workload well. We are excited to see a potential solution and are happy to be helping prove this Cray and Fujitsu technology is a viable alternative for this need. Having this type of capability will be quite complementary to other resources in the NNSA computing complex.”
Cray customers are leaders in their respective fields and often look for opportunities to gain the next edge in performance. The new Fujitsu processor is unique in that it is the first processor to deliver HBM and Arm Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE). HBM2 provides transfer speeds that are significantly faster than DDR4 giving the A64FX a maximum theoretical memory bandwidth greater than 1 terabyte per second (TB/s), and support for Arm SVE provides improved performance for artificial intelligence and analytics. The Cray CS500 system can apply this compute power to a wide range of HPC and AI workloads while still delivering hallmark features of Arm-based systems with high parallelization, low power consumption and high reliability.
It’s a pleasure to partner with Cray on building technologies for the next era of computing,” said Takeshi Horie, Corporate Executive Officer, Vice Head of Service Platform Business Group at Fujitsu. “Both companies have a strong legacy of supercomputing and vector processing. The A64FX Arm processor was designed to empower a wide range of data-intensive applications and is the world’s first CPU to adopt the SVE of the Armv8-A instruction set architecture, specifically extended for supercomputers.”
In this video from the HPC User Forum, Satoshi Matsuoka from RIKEN presents: Arm A64fx and Post-K: Game-Changing CPU & Supercomputer for HPC and its Convergence with Big Data / AI.
The Cray supercomputer powered by Fujitsu A64FX Arm will be available through Cray to customers in mid 2020.
