Review: Fujitsu K super computer ranked fastest in the world

The word K in Fujitsu's super computer ranked fastest in the world, stands for the Japanese word Kei meaning 10 quadrillion (10^16). The Japanese tech-giant Fujitsu apparently styled its new supercomputer as K-computer to indicate its power to do that much of calculations per second. It fell just short of a perfect 10.

Top in the world of Supercomputers - Fujitsu's K-Computer

Yet, with its ability pegged at 8.162 quadrillion calculations per second or petaflop, has been considered quite awesome to overtake Chinese National University of Defense Technology's supercomputer Tianhe1A.

Built in the Japanese city of Kobe's RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science, this Fujitsu wonder has been judged the best in 37th Top 500 Supercomputing List. Tianhe 1A, the previous globe winner supercomputer, was capable of doing just 2.507 petaflops of calculations per second. Fujitsu has packed more power into its k-comp than ever thought possible before. What is more, the company is assiduously working toward achieving its projected goal of developing a supercomputer to do 10 petaflops of calculations every second. So, that would set too stiff a benchmark for any surprise. The company's effort so far, left the judges at the 26th International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’11) held in Hamburg, Germany, totally in awe.

Configuration Stage Specifications

Fujitsu's promise of a 10 petaflop supercomputer is to be fulfilled by the year 2012. Meanwhile, it has assembled 68,544 CPUs of 8 cores each for a total of 548,352 cores. these work with 45 nm CMOS process technology. That is almost twice as many as any other system in the list. While the Chinese supercomputer worked on the Xeon platform, Fujitsu uses 'Venus' SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs. While Xeons are manufactured in different countries all over the world, SPARC CPUs has been developed by HAL Computer Systems. Fujitsu owns almost 44 percent stake in this microprocessor developer company. Reports say that even these microprocessors have been fabricated by Fujitsu. The wonder comp has got 672 racks to hold the CPUs. Each cabinet contains 96 compute nodes of single processor of 16 GB of memory and 610 nodes. This supreme system also reports the highest total power consumption of 9.89 MW. Fujitsu is also working toward making its processors faster. Its interconnections allow the processors to communicate faster amongst themselves. Their speed is also improving. The efficient cooling systems help the computer avoid goof-ups while performing extremely complex calculations.

The Top Five

Japan has found two entries in the list of 500 most efficient super machines. Apart from Fujitsu's K-wonder, the 1.19 petaflop Tsumabe 2.0, developed by Tokyo Institute of Technology holds the fifth spot. The Chinese Tianhe-1A precedes the third ranked 1.75 petaflops Jaguar, developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The Chinese Nebulae has been spotted at the fourth step. It has been developed by National Supercomputing Center, Shenzen.

What it Takes to Stick at the Top

Technology these days renews itself faster than ever before. The result is a big challenge for tech-companies to remain at the top for a considerable period of time. Six months ago, a supercomputer with the ability to do just 31 teraflop of calculations per second was considered good enough to find a mention in the 500 list. That has moved up now to more than 40 teraflops. Take the case of K-computer itself. Its performance of 8.16 quadrillion per second is the result of just four year exercise. In this short period, the computer maker has taken a big leap to storm the Chinese forte. It remains to be seen - for how long K-computer holds its supreme position.