Tsubame is a series of

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

s that operates at the GSIC Center at the

Tokyo Institute of Technology is a national research university located in Greater Tokyo Area, Japan. Tokyo Tech is the largest institution for higher education in Japan dedicated to science and technology, one of first five Designated National University and selected as ...

in Japan, designed by

Satoshi Matsuoka is a Japanese computer scientist and the current head of the Riken Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) at RIKEN, the largest Supercomputing center in Japan. Biography Matsuoka graduated from Musashi Senior High School in 1982 and the U ...

Versions

Tsubame 1.0

The

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

-built Tsubame 1.0 began operation in 2006 achieving 85

TFLOPS In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate mea ...

of performance, it was the most powerful supercomputer in Japan at the time. The system consisted of 655

InfiniBand InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also used ...

connected nodes, each with a 8 dual-core

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...

Opteron Opteron is AMD's x86 former server and workstation processor line, and was the first processor which supported the AMD64 instruction set architecture (known generically as x86-64 or AMD64). It was released on April 22, 2003, with the ''SledgeHa ...

880 and 885 CPUs and 32GB of memory. Tsubame 1.0 also included 600

ClearSpeed ClearSpeed Technology Ltd was a semiconductor company, formed in 2002 to develop enhanced SIMD processors for use in high-performance computing and embedded systems. Based in Bristol, UK, the company has been selling its processors since 2005. ...

X620 Advance cards.

Tsubame 1.2

In 2008, Tsubame was upgraded with 170

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

Tesla S1070 server racks, adding at total of 680 Tesla T10 GPU processors for

GPGPU General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, or less often GPGP) is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU), which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditiona ...

computing. This increased performance to 170 TFLOPS, making it at the time the second most powerful supercomputer in Japan and 29th in the world.

Tsubame 2.0

Tsubame 2.0 was built in 2010 by HP and

NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before rebranding in 1983 as NEC. It provides IT and network soluti ...

as a replacement to Tsubame 1.0. With a peak of 2,288 TFLOPS, in June 2011 it was ranked 5th in the world. It has 1,400 nodes using six-core

Xeon Xeon ( ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded system markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same arc ...

5600 and eight-core Xeon 7500 processors. The system also included 4,200 of Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPGPU compute modules. In total the system had 80.6 TB of DRAM, in addition to 12.7 TB of GDDR memory on the GPU devices.

Tsubame 2.5

Tsubame 2.0 was further upgrade to 2.5 in 2014, replacing all of the Nvidia M2050 GPGPU compute modules with Nvidia Tesla Kepler K20x compute modules. This yielded 17.1 PFLOPS of

single precision Single-precision floating-point format (sometimes called FP32 or float32) is a computer number format, usually occupying 32 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide dynamic range of numeric values by using a floating radix point. A floating- ...

performance.

Tsubame-KFC

Tsubame KFC added oil based liquid cooling to reduce power consumption. This allowed the system to achieve world's best performance efficiencies of 4.5 gigaflops/watt.

Tsubame 3.0

In February 2017, Tokyo Institute of Technology announced it would add a new system Tsubame 3.0. It was developed with

SGI SGI may refer to: Companies *Saskatchewan Government Insurance *Scientific Games International, a gambling company *Silicon Graphics, Inc., a former manufacturer of high-performance computing products *Silicon Graphics International, formerly Rac ...

and is focused on

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

and targeting 12.2 PFLOPS of

double precision Double-precision floating-point format (sometimes called FP64 or float64) is a floating-point number format, usually occupying 64 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide dynamic range of numeric values by using a floating radix point. Flo ...

performance. The design is reported to utilize 2,160 Nvidia Tesla P100 GPGPU modules, in addition to Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 processors. Tsubame 3.0 ranked 13th at 8125 TFLOPS on the November 2017 list of the

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, 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 ...

supercomputer ranking. It ranked 1st on the June 2017 list of the

Green500 The Green500 is a biannual ranking of supercomputers, from the TOP500 list of supercomputers, in terms of energy efficiency. The list measures performance per watt using the TOP500 measure of high performance LINPACK benchmarks at double-precisi ...

energy efficiency ranking at 14.110 GFLOPS/watts.

References

External links

* {{commons category-inline, TSUBAME 3.0 GPGPU supercomputers Supercomputing in Japan