Tsubame, Japanese GPU Supercomputer

In the latest list of the world 's most powerful supercomputers, one interesting exhibit has appeared. This is a Japanese miracle of technology called Tsubame , which is located on the 29th line of the rating with a performance of 77.48 teraflops.

Tsubame is unique in that, besides the usual CPUs, it employs several hundred nVidia GT200 GPUs. That is the most common GPU, which can be found in many consumer PCs.

The supercomputer occupies several rooms on two floors of the building of the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The main computational power is provided by 655 Sun x4600 modules, each with 16 AMD Opteron processors, as well as Clearspeed CSX600 accelerators. But besides them, 170 Nvidia Tesla S1070 units with four graphic processors are connected to the system, each of which has 240 cores.

The entire system is running SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9. The architecture is designed in such a way that new Tesla modules can be added to an existing distributed system, increasing the power of the supercomputer.
')
According to Japanese engineers, in the future, the use of GPUs in supercomputers will become commonplace.