Fugaku computer racks
Today Fujitsu announced that the company has commenced shipping the supercomputer Fugaku. Jointly developed with RIKEN, Fugaku is slated to start general operation between 2021 and 2022.
Fugaku will be comprised of over 150,000 Arm-based Fujitsu A64FX CPUs with a proprietary “Tofu’ interconnect. The system was developed with the aim of achieving up to 100 times the application performance of the K computer with approximately three times the power consumption.
With the highest energy-efficiency in the world, a prototype of the system received the No.1 position in Green500 at SC19. This Green500 award means that we have achieved the world’s highest level of energy efficiency, which is one of the three major development goals of the Fugaku supercomputer: high application performance, energy efficiency and user-friendliness,” said Naoki Shinjo, Corporate Executive Officer, Fujitsu Limited. “Fugaku is a system equipped only with a general-purpose CPU, which can process various applications without using accelerators such as GPUs. In other words, in this ranking, it was verified that Fugaku technologies consume less power than other systems that use accelerators, and that they can perform applications with about 1/3 less energy than other systems that use only general-purpose CPUs. Both the know-how we have accumulated over many years in developing CPUs, and our solid effort to optimize the system from the initial stage of design considering performance and power consumption, have contributed to this achievement.
Fujitsu is commercializing Fukaku technologies for the global HPC market. Going forward, Fujitsu will continue to contribute to the development and utilization of technologies such as computational science, simulations, data utilization, and AI, by developing and delivering high performance supercomputers.
With Fugaku, we succeeded in developing a general-purpose Arm CPU with the world’s highest energy efficiency, far exceeding our targets through Co-design,” said Satoshi Matsuoka, Director, Riken-Center for Computational Science (R-CCS). “While GPU machines dominate high ranks, it is groundbreaking for general-purpose CPU machines to top the list. By becoming a new standard, general-purpose CPUs with different levels of energy efficiency are expected not only to generate revolutionary HPC results, but also to be applied to new technologies such as AI (artificial intelligence) and big data, which will realize Society 5.0.”
Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter
