Earlier this year the Japanese pulled off another herculean HPC effort – by building the world’s largest supercomputer Fugaku – 2.8 times the size of the number two system Summit1. They last achieved the number one position many years ago with the Earth Simulator which reigned for several years straight.
The significant feature of Fugaku, and Earth Simulator before it, is that it is not based on traditional CPU products. Fugaku, which is being jointly developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu Limited, uses a Fujitsu derived Arm CPU called A64FX – with 48 compute cores and four service cores, 512 bit vectorisation and 32GB of HMB to deliver ~1TB/s of memory bandwidth (strikingly similar to Intel’s Xeon Phi Knights Landing used by DUG).
This isn’t your ordinary Raspberry PI Arm CPU. The CPU is calculated to consume between 150-180W of power per socket and deliver ~2.7 TFlops of compute. While this isn’t high by today’s standards (compared to GPU’s), it has considerably more memory bandwidth per core and delivers approximately 80% of peak theoretical performance.
It is great to see a strong new player in the HPC space. Arm is going to rattle a few cages!
- https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2020/06/
- Picture credit: RIKEN
