Tokyo Institute of Technology

Global Scientific Information and Computing Center

Press Release:
Tokyo Institute of Technology to Deploy the Largest “Supercomputing Grid” inJapanNov. 16th, 2005
The Tokyo Institute of Technology is announcing today that it will deploy a “SupercomputingGrid” centered around a supercomputing cluster of the highest performance in Japan at thetime of its deployment in April 2006, and will quickly ramp up the capabilities to become thefirst supercomputer to exceed the 100 Teraflops mark outside of the Unites States by late
Spring of 2006.

Points of Interest•85 TeraFlops (trillion floating point operations per second) to be deployed by March,
2006, to become the fastest supercomputer in Japan, with plans to upgrade thecapability to over 100 TeraFlops by late Spring of 2006.

•To be the core infrastructure of the “Titech Campus Grid,” and expected to be
ranked among the top 5 computers in the world in the June 2006 Top500®
(http://www.top500.org/).

•With superior cost performance and high affinity with modern desktop
environment, the new supercomputing grid will be utilized extensively in grandchallenge problem solving in a variety of research areas such as bio-science,nano-science, environmental as well as disaster (prevention) simulations, allowing
for high productivity thereby accelerating a variety of important scientific research.

Abstract
The overall system integration has been awarded to NEC, who will combine a fleet ofSun Fire™ x64 servers with 10,480 AMD Opteron™ processor cores, Sun and NEC
storage technologies, Voltaire’s Infiniband network, as well as ClearSpeed SIMD
acceleration boards to construct a supercomputing cluster to serve as the corecomputing fabric of the “Titech Campus Grid” being lead by Professor Satoshi Matsuokaof the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center. The machine will be theworld’s largest and fastest supercomputing cluster as measured by core CPU count andpeak performance, respectively, initially achieving 85 Teraflops in the March 2006
deployment, with planned increases to beyond 100 Teraflops with the installation of
additional ClearSpeed accelerator boards by late Spring of 2006. Moreover, withsupplemental deployment of NEC’s vector nodes, the overall infrastructure will becomeTokyo Institute of Technology

Global Scientific Information and Computing Center

the so-called “hybrid supercomputer” that will facilitate applications spanning fromlegacy to the most modern ones, all accessible from a standard desktop environment.
The system will also facilitate over 21 TeraBytes of memory, as well as 1.1 Petabytesof hard disk storage, again besting all other machines outside of the United States; infact, the expectation is to use the abundant resources establish a new usage model ofsupercomputers that will not only be internal to an institution, but rather, will allow
fostering of international as well as industry-academia collaborations among thescientists in different organizations. As such, the Institute hopes to establish
recognition as the leading site in the Asia-Pacific region with respect to supercomputing
and grid technologies with the new supercomputing grid, paving the way for active
contributions in fundamental software, application and architectural research towards
the 10 PetaFlops-class supercomputing project undergoing planning as the core
national infrastructural project in Japan by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports,
Science and Technology (MEXT).
Application Areas
The overwhelming performance of the system will allow for accelerating a variety ofcomplex grand-challenge scientific problems that are undergoing research at the Tokyo
Institute of Technology, such as analyzing the molecular structure of proteins,
simulated bloodflow diagnosis in human brains, modeling of the generation mechanismof Earth and planetary magnetic field and their long term effects, analysis of the effectof natural disasters and their preventive measures, to nanoscience simulation of carbon
nanotubes. Moreover the deployment of grid middleware being developed by theJapanese National Research Grid Initiative (NAREGI) (http://www.naregi.org), also
being sponsored by MEXT, the supercomputing grid is expected to host various
international as well as industry-academia cross-organizational projects as a part of theJapanese national grid infrastructure.
Contacts
Professor Satoshi Matsuoka
Research Infrastructure DivisionTokyo Institute of Technology
Tel&Fax: +81-3-5734-3876
matsu@is.titech.ac.jp
http://www.titech.ac.jp
Professor Takayuki Aoki
Global Scientific Collaboration DivisionTokyo Institute of Technology
TEL: +81-3-5734-3667
FAX: +81-3-5734-3276
taoki@gsic.titech.ac.jp

General Affairs Division, Evaluation andPublic Relations DivisionTokyo Institute of Technology
TEL: +81-3-5734-2975
FAX: +81-3-5734-3661
kouhou@jim.titech.ac.jp

Tokyo Institute of Technology

Global Scientific Information and Computing Center

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Sun Fire, Solaris and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks orregistered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. AMD, Opteron, theAMD logo, the AMD Opteron logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices. Allother brand and product names are trademarks, registered trademarks or service marks of their respectiveholders.