Scientists using the world’s most powerful supercomputer, the Arm-based Fugaku system at Japan’s Riken Center for Computational Science, have generated findings that relate humidity to the spread of coronavirus: the more humid the air, the lesser the aerosol spread. In a story published by Reuters yesterday, it was reported that the “supercomputer showed that humidity […]
Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40 Billion – Jensen Huang Comments on ‘the Next Major Computing Platform’
Nvidia and SoftBank Group Corp. (SBG) have announced an agreement under which Nvidia will acquire Arm Limited from SBG and the SoftBank Vision Fund in a transaction valued at $40 billion. As part of Nvidia, “Arm will continue to operate its open-licensing model while maintaining the global customer neutrality that has been foundational to its […]
The Hyperion-insideHPC Interviews: Simon Burbridge Gives ARM a Hand – ‘Maybe We Don’t Need to Have Accelerators’
At this point in the career of HPC luminary Simon Burbridge of the University of Bristol, he’s focused on HPC system design based on ARM-designed processors. Citing the world’s top ranked supercomputer, Japan’s Fugaku, Burbridge says in this interview: “If you redesign your CPUs to have the capability of doing the amount of math that you need and if you have, for example, the memory bandwidth to get those vectors and matrices in and out of the memory, then why wouldn’t they be better than a GPU?”
RIKEN’s Fugaku to Connect via Oracle Cloud
The RIKEN Center for Computational Science, Kobe, Japan, owner of the world’s no. 1-ranked supercomputer, Fugaku, has chosen Oracle Cloud as the public cloud provider for its elastic HPC storage and to enable universities and research organizations to connect through Japan’s Science Information Network (SINET). Performing at 415 quadrillion computations a second, or 415 petaFLOPS, Fugaku […]
RadioFreeHPC Podcast: New Top on the TOP500
We have a new #1 on the TOP500 list of most powerful supercomputers. Big gets bigger by a factor of 2.8x as Fujitsu’s “Supercomputer Fugaku” tops the list at 415 PFlops. There are also an additional three new entries in the top 10. We break down the top of the list in this fascinating episode […]
ARM-based Fugaku Supercomputer on Summit of New Top500 – Surpasses Exaflops on AI Benchmark
The new no. 1 system on the updated ranking of the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, released this morning, is Fugaku, a machine built at the Riken Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan. The new top system turned in a High Performance LINPACK (HPL) result of 415.5 petaflops (nearly half an exascale), outperforming Summit, the former no. 1 system housed at the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab, by a factor of 2.8x. Fugaku, powered by Fujitsu’s 48-core A64FX SoC, is the first ARM-based system to take the TOP500 top spot.
Fugaku Supercomputer joins fight against COVID-19
Today RIKEN in Japan announced that the partially finished Fugaku supercomputer will be made available for research projects aimed to combat COVID-19. The installation of the new supercomputer began in December 2019, and it is scheduled to go into full-fledged open use in 2021. “To combat the global pandemic of the COVID-19 virus, we will rapidly provide access to the capabilities of Fugaku, leapfrogging its preparation, to accelerate the scientific process of diagnosis, treatment, as well as general prevention of infection spread, to contribute to the early termination of the pandemic.”
Video: Overview of the Fujitsu A64fx processor
This video from Coreteks provides an overview of the Fujitsu A64FX processor that will power the pending Fugaku supercomputer in Japan. “The A64FX is a many core CPU like AMD Epyc or Intel’s Xeons, but at the same time it behaves like a GPU in some workloads matching NVIDIA’s most powerful offering, Volta. Today we’ll look at how this chip operates, why it could challenge Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and cloud and hyperscalers and what it could mean for us PC enthusiasts.”
Arm HPC User Group to Host First Annual Meeting in Portugal
Arm’s HPC User Group (A-HUG) is transitioning to a fully-fledged community-led organization to better support the Arm ecosystem. The first annual meeting of the community-lead A-HUG will be held March 12-13 in Porto, Portugal. “The A-HUG event will include a hands-on training event and excellent talks covering the broad landscape of early systems & experience, near-term expectations for new hardware, and long term trends for architectures.”