Nextx -Generation Supercomputer

Developing and building the supercomputer
The Next-Generation Supercomputer will be a general-purpose computer system with the highest performance in the world.
RIKEN is the core organization for the development of this world-leading supercomputer.

The world’s most advanced scalar-type1 supercomputer system【System architecture and features】
・The system will use scalar CPUs (SPARC64™ VIIIfx, 8 cores, 128 gigaflops) manufactured with 45nm process technology. To achieve
high performance and high scalability to ultra-large-scale system, the CPU will additionally support SIMD (Single Instruction MultipleData) processing, and will be furnished with functions for instruction retry as well as conventional error detection/correction, contributing to high performance and reliability in application execution in an environment with huge numbers of CPUs.
・The network between the computing nodes will consist of a direct-connection network2, ensuring high flexibility and scalability and enabling ultra-large-scale connectivity. Users can create application programs adapted to either a one-, two- or three-dimensional torus
network, contributing to improvements in convenience, fault-tolerance and interoperability.
・With its water cooling system, the supercomputer will maintain a low temperature in the CPU and other LSIs, minimizing the failure
rate and reducing power consumption.
・An ultra-large-scale file system with high functionality, scalable to several hundred petabytes, will provide several dozen petabytes foruser areas.
・The system will have an interface for the NAREGI( National Research Grid Initiative) middleware, one example of external uses of thesystem through the Science Information NETwork (SINET).
1 A scalar-type supercomputer is a set of computing nodes with scalar CPUs connected by a network. CPUs operate on data in small chunks in sequential order.
Scalar-type supercomputers are today a common style of supercomputer systemused throughout the world. These supercomputers are well-suited to computations involving complex data access, such as those involved in structural analysesof nano-scale devices as well as analyses of gene and protein data.

2 There are two styles of networks, direct-connection networks and indirect-connection networks.
In a direct-connection network, the entire network consists of numerous connections between
pairs of nodes. In an indirect-connection network, a switch sits between multiple nodes. Athree-dimensional torus network is a kind of direct-connection network where the nodes are organized into a three-dimensional structure, and each is linked to six others, forming a ring structure on each dimension.

RackSystem

System board
CPU

SPARC64TM VIIIfx

Next-Generation Supercomputer

Three-dimensional torus network【System software】
System software, which manages hardware and application software, is indispensable in making full use of hardware capability.
The Next-Generation Supercomputer harnesses the following system software in order to offer users a high-performance computing environment:
・The adoption of Linux Operating System (OS) providing high portability
・A rich programming language suite that allows for continuity of software assets
・MPI (Message Passing Interface) Library used in advanced data communication for parallelization
・High-performance, highly functional and system-optimized scientific and numerical library05