The construction of the supercomputer “K” on 10 petaflops has begun

Fujitsu and Japan’s largest research institute RIKEN have begun building a supercomputer with an estimated capacity of 10 petaflops (10 ¹⁶ , that is, 10 quadrillion operations per second). The name “K” corresponds to the Japanese word “Kei”, which means 10 ¹⁶ .

For comparison, today's leader in the world supercomputer ranking has a performance of only 1.76 petaflops, and the most powerful Russian supercomputer - 0.35 petaflops.


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The design will include more than 800 server racks and more than 80,000 Fujitsu SPARC 64 VIIIfx 2.2 GHz processors (128 gigaflops each) with water cooling.


^{Fujitsu "Venus" Sparc64-VIIIfx water-cooled motherboard}

A unique feature of the supercomputer will be the 6D Mesh / Torus (Tofu) network topology, used for the first time in the world.


^{The past generation 3D Mesh / Torus topology used in the BlueGene / L supercomputer}

The 6D Mesh / Torus topology assumes even more connections between nodes on the network than 3D Mesh / Torus. So it is easier to group the computational processes, and in case of failure of a separate node the throughput of the surrounding nodes will not suffer.

Each block of 12 nodes is placed in a 3D grid (x, y, z) with three additional communication paths (a, b, c). In short, the 6D Mesh / Torus scheme is explained in this presentation on pages 13-16.



The supercomputer “K” will be commissioned in the fall of 2012.