Supercomputing in Japan
Encyclopedia
Japan
operates a number of centers for supercomputing which hold world records in speed, with the K computer
becoming the world's fastest in June 2011.
The K computer's performance is impressive, according to professor Jack Dongarra
who maintains the TOP500
list of supercomputers, and it surpasses its next 5 competitors combined. The K computer costs US$10 million a year to operate.
family was developed by NEC Corporation and announced in April l989. The SX-3/44R became the fastest supercomputer in the world in 1990. Fujitsu's Numerical Wind Tunnel
supercomputer gained the top spot in 1993.
The K computer's placement on the top spot is seven years after Japan held the title in 2004. The Earth Simulator
supercomputer built by NEC
at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) was the fastest in the world at that time with a peak of 131 TFlops, using proprietary vector processing chips.
The K computer, on the other hand, uses over 60,000 commercial scalar
SPARC64 VIIIfx processors housed in over 600 cabinets. The fact that K computer
is over 60 times faster than the Earth Simulator, and that the Earth Simulator ranks as the 68th system in the world 7 years after holding the top spot demonstrates both the rapid increase in top performance in Japan and the widespread growth of supercomputing technology worldwide.
The GSIC Center at the Tokyo Institute of Technology
houses the Tsubame
2.0 supercomputer, which has a peak of 2,288 Tflops
and in June 2011 ranked 5th in the world. It was developed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in collaboration with NEC
and HP, and has 1,400 nodes using both HP Proliant and NVIDIA Tesla processors.
The RIKEN MDGRAPE-3
for molecular dynamics simulations of proteins is a special purpose petascale supercomputer at the Advanced Center for Computing and Communication, RIKEN
in Wako, Saitama
, just outside Tokyo. It uses over 4,800 custom MDGRAPE-3 chips, as well as Intel Xeon processors. However, given that it is a special purpose computer, it can not appear on the TOP500
list which requires Linpack
benchmarking.
The next significant system is Japan Atomic Energy Agency
's PRIMERGY BX900 Fujitsu supercomputer. It is significantly slower, reaching 200 TFlops and ranking as the 38th in the world in 2011.
Historically, the Gravity Pipe
(GRAPE) system for astrophysics
at the University of Tokyo
was distinguished not by its top speed of 64 Tflops, but by its cost and energy efficiency, having won the Gordon Bell Prize
in 1999, at about $7 per megaflops, using special purpose processing elements.
DEGIMA
is a highly cost and energy-efficient computer cluster at the Nagasaki Advanced Computing Center, Nagasaki University
. It is used for hierarchical N-body simulation
s and has a peak performance of 111 TFLOPS with an energy efficiency of 1376 MFLOPS/watt. The overall cost of the hardware was approximately US$500,000.
in the National Research Grid Initiative (NAREGI) project to develop high-performance, scalable grids over very high-speed networks as a future computational infrastructure for scientific and engineering research.
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
operates a number of centers for supercomputing which hold world records in speed, with the K computer
K computer
The K computer – named for the Japanese word , which stands for 10 quadrillion – is a supercomputer being produced by Fujitsu at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Japan. In June 2011, TOP500 ranked K the world's fastest supercomputer, with a rating...
becoming the world's fastest in June 2011.
The K computer's performance is impressive, according to professor Jack Dongarra
Jack Dongarra
Jack J. Dongarra is a University Distinguished Professor of Computer Sciencein the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee...
who maintains the TOP500
TOP500
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year...
list of supercomputers, and it surpasses its next 5 competitors combined. The K computer costs US$10 million a year to operate.
Previous records
Japan's entry into supercomputing started in the 1980s, and among others, the SX-3 supercomputerSX-3 supercomputer
The SX-3 supercomputer family was developed by NEC Corporation in Japan and announced in April l989. The SX-3/44R became the fastest supercomputer in the world in 1990....
family was developed by NEC Corporation and announced in April l989. The SX-3/44R became the fastest supercomputer in the world in 1990. Fujitsu's Numerical Wind Tunnel
Numerical Wind Tunnel
Numerical Wind Tunnel was an early implementation of the vector parallel architecture developed in a joint project between National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan and Fujitsu. It was the first supercomputer with a sustained performance of close to 100 Gflop/s for a wide range of fluid dynamics...
supercomputer gained the top spot in 1993.
| Top speed (Tflops FLOPS In computing, FLOPS is a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations, similar to the older, simpler, instructions per second... ) |
Country | Number of computers in TOP500 TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year... |
|---|---|---|
| 8162 |  Japan |
26 |
| 2566 |  Mainland China |
61 |
| 1759 |  United States |
255 |
| 1050 |  Early Modern France |
25 |
| 826 |  Germany |
30 |
| 350 |  Russia |
12 |
| 316 |  South Korea |
4 |
| 275 | 27 |
The K computer's placement on the top spot is seven years after Japan held the title in 2004. The Earth Simulator
Earth Simulator
The Earth Simulator , developed by the Japanese government's initiative "Earth Simulator Project", was a highly parallel vector supercomputer system for running global climate models to evaluate the effects of global warming and problems in solid earth geophysics...
supercomputer built by NEC
NEC
, a Japanese multinational IT company, has its headquarters in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. NEC, part of the Sumitomo Group, provides information technology and network solutions to business enterprises, communications services providers and government....
at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) was the fastest in the world at that time with a peak of 131 TFlops, using proprietary vector processing chips.
The K computer, on the other hand, uses over 60,000 commercial scalar
Scalar processor
Scalar processors represent the simplest class of computer processors. A scalar processor processes one datum at a time . , a scalar processor is classified as a SISD processor .In a vector processor, by contrast, a single instruction operates simultaneously on multiple data items...
SPARC64 VIIIfx processors housed in over 600 cabinets. The fact that K computer
K computer
The K computer – named for the Japanese word , which stands for 10 quadrillion – is a supercomputer being produced by Fujitsu at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Japan. In June 2011, TOP500 ranked K the world's fastest supercomputer, with a rating...
is over 60 times faster than the Earth Simulator, and that the Earth Simulator ranks as the 68th system in the world 7 years after holding the top spot demonstrates both the rapid increase in top performance in Japan and the widespread growth of supercomputing technology worldwide.
Supercomputing centers
Tokyo Institute of Technology
The Tokyo Institute of Technology is a public research university located in Greater Tokyo Area, Japan. Tokyo Tech is the largest institution for higher education in Japan dedicated to science and technology. Tokyo Tech enrolled 4,850 undergaraduates and 5006 graduate students for 2009-2010...
houses the Tsubame
Tsubame (supercomputer)
The Tsubame supercomputer operates at the GSIC Center at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan. It has a peak of 2,288 Tflops and in June 2011 ranked 5th in the world. It was developed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in collaboration with NEC and HP, and has 1,400 nodes using both HP...
2.0 supercomputer, which has a peak of 2,288 Tflops
FLOPS
In computing, FLOPS is a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations, similar to the older, simpler, instructions per second...
and in June 2011 ranked 5th in the world. It was developed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in collaboration with NEC
NEC
, a Japanese multinational IT company, has its headquarters in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. NEC, part of the Sumitomo Group, provides information technology and network solutions to business enterprises, communications services providers and government....
and HP, and has 1,400 nodes using both HP Proliant and NVIDIA Tesla processors.
The RIKEN MDGRAPE-3
RIKEN MDGRAPE-3
MDGRAPE-3 is an ultra-high performance petascale supercomputer system developed by the RIKEN research institute in Japan. It is a special purpose system built for molecular dynamics simulations, especially protein structure prediction....
for molecular dynamics simulations of proteins is a special purpose petascale supercomputer at the Advanced Center for Computing and Communication, RIKEN
RIKEN
is a large natural sciences research institute in Japan. Founded in 1917, it now has approximately 3000 scientists on seven campuses across Japan, the main one in Wako, just outside Tokyo...
in Wako, Saitama
Wako, Saitama
is a city located in the southern part of Saitama, Japan, bordering on Tokyo.As of 1 May 2008, the city has an estimated population of 76,221. The total area is 11.04 km²....
, just outside Tokyo. It uses over 4,800 custom MDGRAPE-3 chips, as well as Intel Xeon processors. However, given that it is a special purpose computer, it can not appear on the TOP500
TOP500
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year...
list which requires Linpack
LINPACK
LINPACK is a software library for performing numerical linear algebra on digital computers. It was written in Fortran by Jack Dongarra, Jim Bunch, Cleve Moler, and Gilbert Stewart, and was intended for use on supercomputers in the 1970s and early 1980s...
benchmarking.
The next significant system is Japan Atomic Energy Agency
Japan Atomic Energy Agency
The was formed October 1, 2005 by a merger of two previous semi-governmental organizations. While it inherited the activities of both PNC and JAERI, it also inherited the nickname of JAERI, "Genken" 原研, an abbreviated word for "nuclear research"....
's PRIMERGY BX900 Fujitsu supercomputer. It is significantly slower, reaching 200 TFlops and ranking as the 38th in the world in 2011.
Historically, the Gravity Pipe
Gravity Pipe
Gravity Pipe, otherwise known as GRAPE, is a project which uses hardware acceleration to perform gravitational computations. Integrated with Beowulf-style commodity computers, the GRAPE system calculates the force of gravity that a given mass, such as a star, exerts on others...
(GRAPE) system for astrophysics
Astrophysics
Astrophysics is the branch of astronomy that deals with the physics of the universe, including the physical properties of celestial objects, as well as their interactions and behavior...
at the University of Tokyo
University of Tokyo
, abbreviated as , is a major research university located in Tokyo, Japan. The University has 10 faculties with a total of around 30,000 students, 2,100 of whom are foreign. Its five campuses are in Hongō, Komaba, Kashiwa, Shirokane and Nakano. It is considered to be the most prestigious university...
was distinguished not by its top speed of 64 Tflops, but by its cost and energy efficiency, having won the Gordon Bell Prize
Gordon Bell Prize
The Gordon Bell Prizes are a set of awards awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery in conjunction with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers each year at the Supercomputing Conference to recognize outstanding achievement in high-performance computing applications...
in 1999, at about $7 per megaflops, using special purpose processing elements.
DEGIMA
DEGIMA (computer cluster)
The DEGIMA is a high performance computer cluster used for hierarchical N-body simulations at the Nagasaki Advanced Computing Center, Nagasaki University....
is a highly cost and energy-efficient computer cluster at the Nagasaki Advanced Computing Center, Nagasaki University
Nagasaki University
is a national university of Japan. Its nickname is Chōdai . The main campus is located in Bunkyo-machi, Nagasaki City, Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan.- History :...
. It is used for hierarchical N-body simulation
N-body simulation
An N-body simulation is a simulation of a dynamical system of particles, usually under the influence of physical forces, such as gravity . In cosmology, they are used to study processes of non-linear structure formation such as the process of forming galaxy filaments and galaxy halos from dark...
s and has a peak performance of 111 TFLOPS with an energy efficiency of 1376 MFLOPS/watt. The overall cost of the hardware was approximately US$500,000.
Grid computing
Starting in 2003, Japan used grid computingGrid computing
Grid computing is a term referring to the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains to reach a common goal. The grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve a large number of files...
in the National Research Grid Initiative (NAREGI) project to develop high-performance, scalable grids over very high-speed networks as a future computational infrastructure for scientific and engineering research.
See also
- Computer scienceComputer scienceComputer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
- ComputingComputingComputing is usually defined as the activity of using and improving computer hardware and software. It is the computer-specific part of information technology...
- History of supercomputingHistory of supercomputingThe history of supercomputing goes back to the 1960s when a series of computers at Control Data Corporation were designed by Seymour Cray to use innovative designs and parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance...
- Personal supercomputerPersonal supercomputerA personal supercomputer is a computer built for the demand of a powerful computer system. On the civil basis, PSCs are typically built by the user. However government computers have been built by contract companies and/or governmental experts. Although considerably more expensive than a personal...
- Supercomputing in ChinaSupercomputing in ChinaThe People's Republic of China operates a number of supercomputer centers which hold world records in speed.The origins of these centers go back to 1989, when the State Planning Commission, the State Science and Technology Commission and the World Bank jointly launched a project to develop...
- Supercomputing in EuropeSupercomputing in EuropeSeveral centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing...
- Supercomputing in IndiaSupercomputing in IndiaIndia's supercomputer program was started in late 1980s because Cray supercomputers were denied for import due to an arms embargo imposed on India, as it was a dual use technology and could be used for developing nuclear weapons....
- TOP500TOP500The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year...