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.”
Prototype of Fugaku Supercomputer reaches Number One on Green500
Today Fujitsu announced that a prototype of the Fugaku supercomputer being jointly developed by the two parties took No.1 in the Green500, a global ranking based on the energy efficiency of 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).
A64fx: A Game Changing, HPC / AI Optimized Arm CPU for Exascale
Satoshi Matsuoka from Riken gave this talk at Linaro Connect 2019. “Fugaku is the flagship next generation national supercomputer being developed by Riken R-CCS and Fujitsu in collaboration. Fugaku will have hyperscale datacenter class resource in a single exascale machine, with more than 150,000 nodes of sever-class Fujitsu A64fx many-core Arm CPUs with the new SVE (Scalable Vector Extension) with low precision math for the first time in the world, accelerating both HPC and AI workloads, augmented with HBM2 memory paired with each CPU, exhibiting nearly a Terabyte/s memory bandwidth for both HPC and AI rapid data movements.”
Video: Arm HPC Update from ISC 2019
In this video, Brent Gorda provides an update on the progress on Arm HPC from the ISC 2019 conference in Frankfurt. “From the perspective of Arm in HPC, it was an excellent event with several high-profile announcements that caught everyone’s attention. The Arm ecosystem was well represented with our partners visible on the show floor and around town.”