K Computer
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The K computer named for the Japanese word/numeral , meaning 10 quadrillion (1016)See Japanese numbers was a supercomputer manufactured by
Fujitsu is a Japanese multinational information and communications technology equipment and services corporation, established in 1935 and headquartered in Tokyo. Fujitsu is the world's sixth-largest IT services provider by annual revenue, and the la ...
, installed at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in
Kobe Kobe ( , ; officially , ) is the capital city of Hyōgo Prefecture Japan. With a population around 1.5 million, Kobe is Japan's seventh-largest city and the third-largest port city after Tokyo and Yokohama. It is located in Kansai region, w ...
,
Hyōgo Prefecture is a prefecture of Japan located in the Kansai region of Honshu. Hyōgo Prefecture has a population of 5,469,762 () and has a geographic area of . Hyōgo Prefecture borders Kyoto Prefecture to the east, Osaka Prefecture to the southeast, ...
, Japan. The K computer was based on a
distributed memory In computer science, distributed memory refers to a multiprocessor computer system in which each processor has its own private memory. Computational tasks can only operate on local data, and if remote data are required, the computational task m ...
architecture with over 80,000 compute nodes. It was used for a variety of applications, including climate research, disaster prevention and medical research. The K computer's
operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...
was based on the
Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ...
, with additional drivers designed to make use of the computer's hardware. In June 2011,
TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non- distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coinc ...
ranked K the world's fastest supercomputer, with a computation speed of over 8 petaflops, and in November 2011, K became the first computer to top 10 petaflops.June 2011 TOP500 Supercomputer Sites
/ref> It had originally been slated for completion in June 2012. In June 2012, K was superseded as the world's fastest supercomputer by the American IBM Sequoia. , the K computer holds the third place for the HPCG benchmark. It held the first place until June 2018, when it was superseded by
Summit A summit is a point on a surface that is higher in elevation than all points immediately adjacent to it. The topographic terms acme, apex, peak (mountain peak), and zenith are synonymous. The term (mountain top) is generally used only for a m ...
and
Sierra Sierra (Spanish for "mountain range" and "saw", from Latin '' serra'') may refer to the following: Places Mountains and mountain ranges * Sierra de Juárez, a mountain range in Baja California, Mexico * Sierra de las Nieves, a mountain range i ...
. , K is the world's 20th-fastest computer, with the IBM's Summit and Sierra being the fastest supercomputers. The K supercomputer was decommissioned on 30 August 2019. In Japan, the K computer was succeeded by the Fugaku supercomputer, in 2020, which took the top spot, and is three times faster than 2nd most powerful supercomputer.


Performance

On 20 June 2011, the
TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non- distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coinc ...
Project Committee announced that K had set a LINPACK record with a performance of 8.162 petaflops, making it the fastest supercomputer in the world at the time; it achieved this performance with a computing efficiency ratio of 93.0%. The previous record holder was the Chinese National University of Defense Technology's Tianhe-1A, which performed at 2.507 petaflops. The TOP500 list is revised semiannually, and the rankings change frequently, indicating the speed at which computing power is increasing. In November 2011, Riken reported that K had become the first supercomputer to exceed 10 petaflops, achieving a LINPACK performance of 10.51 quadrillion computations per second with a computing efficiency ratio of 93.2%."K computer" Achieves Goal of 10 Petaflops"
Fujitsu. 2 November 2011. Retrieved 10 November. 2011.
K received top ranking in all four performance benchmarks at the 2011 HPC Challenge Awards. On 18 June 2012, the TOP500 Project Committee announced that the
California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the ...
-based IBM Sequoia supercomputer replaced K as the world's fastest supercomputer, with a LINPACK performance of 16.325 petaflops. Sequoia is 55% faster than K, using 123% more CPU processors, but is also 150% more energy efficient. On the TOP500 list, it became first in June 2011, falling down through time to lower positions, to eighteenth in November 2018. K computer holds third place in the HPCG benchmark test proposed by
Jack Dongarra Jack Joseph Dongarra (born July 18, 1950) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the American University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the Unive ...
, with 0.6027 HPCG PFLOPS in November 2018.


Specifications


Node architecture

The K computer comprises 88,128 2.0 GHz eight-core SPARC64 VIIIfx processors contained in 864 cabinets, for a total of 705,024 cores, manufactured by Fujitsu with
45 nm Per the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, the 45 nm process is a MOSFET technology node referring to the average half-pitch of a memory cell manufactured at around the 2007–2008 time frame. Matsushita and Intel started mass ...
CMOS technology. Each cabinet contains 96 computing nodes, in addition to six I/O nodes. Each computing node contains a single processor and 16 GB of memory. The computer's water cooling system is designed to minimize
failure rate Failure rate is the frequency with which an engineered system or component fails, expressed in failures per unit of time. It is usually denoted by the Greek letter λ (lambda) and is often used in reliability engineering. The failure rate of a ...
and power consumption.


Network

The nodes are connected by Fujitsu's proprietary
torus fusion Torus fusion (tofu) is a proprietary computer network topology for supercomputers developed by Fujitsu. It is a variant of the torus interconnect. The system has been used in the K computer and the Fugaku supercomputer (and their derivatives). Tof ...
(''Tofu'') interconnect.


File system

The system adopts a two-level local/global
file system In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one lar ...
with parallel/distributed functions, and provides users with an automatic staging function for moving files between global and local file systems. Fujitsu developed an optimized parallel file system based on Lustre, called the Fujitsu Exabyte File System (FEFS), which is scalable to several hundred petabytes.


Power consumption

Although the K computer reported the highest total power consumption of any 2011 TOP500 supercomputer (9.89  MW the equivalent of almost 10,000 suburban homes), it is relatively efficient, achieving 824.6 GFlop/kW. This is 29.8% more efficient than China's NUDT TH MPP (ranked #2 in 2011), and 225.8% more efficient than Oak Ridge's Jaguar-Cray XT5-HE (ranked #3 in 2011). However, K's power efficiency still falls far short of the 2097.2 GFlops/kWatt supercomputer record set by IBM's NNSA/SC Blue Gene/Q Prototype 2. For comparison, the average power consumption of a TOP 10 system in 2011 was 4.3 MW, and the average efficiency was 463.7 GFlop/kW. According to TOP500 compiler
Jack Dongarra Jack Joseph Dongarra (born July 18, 1950) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the American University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the Unive ...
, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the
University of Tennessee The University of Tennessee (officially The University of Tennessee, Knoxville; or UT Knoxville; UTK; or UT) is a public land-grant research university in Knoxville, Tennessee. Founded in 1794, two years before Tennessee became the 16th state ...
, the K computer's performance equals "one million linked desktop computers". The computer's annual running costs are estimated at US$10 million.


K Computer Mae rapid transit station

On 1 July 2011,
Kobe Kobe ( , ; officially , ) is the capital city of Hyōgo Prefecture Japan. With a population around 1.5 million, Kobe is Japan's seventh-largest city and the third-largest port city after Tokyo and Yokohama. It is located in Kansai region, w ...
's Port Island Line
rapid transit Rapid transit or mass rapid transit (MRT), also known as heavy rail or metro, is a type of high-capacity public transport generally found in urban areas. A rapid transit system that primarily or traditionally runs below the surface may be c ...
system renamed one of its stations from "Port Island Minami" to "K Computer Mae" (meaning "In front of K Computer") denoting its vicinity.


See also

* PRIMEHPC FX10 *
Supercomputing in Japan Japan operates a number of centers for supercomputing which hold world records in speed, with the K computer becoming the world's fastest in June 2011. and Fugaku took the lead in June 2020, and furthered it, as of November 2020, to 3 times fa ...
* Graph500


Notes


References


External links


Riken Advanced Institute for Computational ScienceK computer: Fujitsu Global
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20120311072800/http://www.riken.go.jp/engn/r-world/info/release/news/2006/apr/index.html#frol_01 Special Interview: Taking on the Challenge of a 10-Petaflop Computer, Riken News, No. 298, April 2006.]
June 2017 Top 500
{{DEFAULTSORT:K computer 2011 in science Fujitsu supercomputers One-of-a-kind computers Petascale computers Riken SPARC microprocessor products Supercomputing in Japan 64-bit computers