HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING


“They’re getting very close to the first machines that are going to be delivered next year. The first one is going to be at Oak Ridge”


do because we are a national project and we are trying to achieve this unobtainable goal.


‘Otherwise, it would not be possible by the standard development processes of a single company,’ he said. Matsuoka gave standard CPU


development cycles as an example. Noting that while a speedup of 10 to 20 per cent per generation is fine for a commercial company making incremental gains to support its existing customer base, it was not sufficient to realise the ambitions of the Fugaku supercomputer. ‘It is harder to take risks, so you make


advances but you make baby steps.’ said Matsuoka. ‘Of course, if you look at the holistic


commented on the development of the Fugaku system and some of the challenges that the teams faced to deliver the hardware and software updates that made the system possible. While it may not deliver the performance of the US systems scheduled to be delivered two years from now, the Fugaku supercomputer does highlight the development efforts of Japanese researchers and Fujitsu, who developed their own Arm-based processor and other technologies, such as the Tofu networking system used in Fugaku.


www.scientific-computing.com | @scwmagazine Matsuoka said early in development


Riken saw the need to accommodate emerging technologies such as AI and maching learning (ML), which require mixed precision to accelerate performance. ‘We have been very flexible in accommodating these types of emerging applications, and that is also due to the fact we are designing our own hardware from scratch. ‘Designing any hardware is a balancing


act, and then you try to leapfrog by using advanced technologies. In our case, that was another thing that we were able to


lifespan of hardware architecture you will see significant advances but that is ‘still bound by the limitations of having to accommodate existing users’. Commercial companies have to manage risk more carefully as the risk of new technology development falls solely to the organisation. In the case of Riken, the development of the processor was subsidised by the Japanese government and Fujitsu. ‘In our case, we are a national project,


we can, and in fact, we are obligated to take risks because the government are financing it. If we fail, then we may never be able to do it again but it is not like a company will go under. We are expected to take these risks and so we adopted or developed technologies that are otherwise still not used or utilised in existing CPUs such as high bandwidth memory (HBM). This has resulted in this leadership performance which others, to date, have not been able to follow,’ added Matsuoka.


Autumn 2020 Scientific Computing World


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