Tokyo Tech to House One of the World's Top 10 Supercomputers
Attendees at the Supercomputing 2005 conference this week in Seattle learned that
the Tokyo Institute of Technology will soon be home to one of the world's
fastest supercomputers. The supercomputer will debut this coming spring, when
it is expected to easily secure one of the highest 10 positions on the Top500
list (based on the LINPACK Benchmark)-initially realizing 85 trillion floating
point operations per second (teraFLOPS), with the potential to reach more than
100 trillion teraFLOPS after adjustments for peak performance.
The design includes more than 21 Terabytes of memory and 1.1 Petabytes of hard
disk storage. The use of AMD processors, NEC integration expertise, and Sun
Microsystems high performance computing (HPC) technologies all factor into the
delivery of the system in such a short timeframe. The supercomputer will be
built of standard industry components, including AMD Opteron processors, Sun
Fire x64 servers, and Sun storage technologies. The system will use Sun's N1
System Manager and N1 Grid Engine, and will be provisioned to support both the
Solaris 10 and Linux operating systems.
The potential for the international research community to access and benefit
from the supercomputer is great. Satoshi Matsuoka, professor in charge of Research
Infrastructure at the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center at
the Tokyo Institute of Technology commented, "Tokyo Tech's system will
be leveraged by a wide range of researchers within the university and throughout
the world."
Pictured above: Sun Microsystem's new HPC center in Hillsboro, OR, which features
some of the technologies to be incorporated in the future supercomputer at Tokyo
Tech. (Photo courtesy Sun Microsystems)
