JCAHPC's Oakforest-PACS Certified by Top500 as Japan's Highest Performance Supercomputer

The University of Tokyo, the University of Tsukuba, and Fujitsu Limited today announced that the Oakforest-PACS massively parallel cluster-type supercomputer, built by Fujitsu and operated by the Joint Center for Advanced High Performance Computing (JCAHPC), has achieved a LINPACK performance result of 13.55 petaflops, as ranked in the November Top500 list for supercomputer performance. Given this, Oakforest-PACS has surpassed the K computer to officially become the highest performance supercomputer in Japan. The system's peak performance is 25 petaflops, which is about 2.2 times that of the K computer.

The Oakforest-PACS system is located in the Information Technology Center on the University of Tokyo's Kashiwa Campus, but everything is carried out jointly by the University of Tokyo and the University of Tsukuba, including financing, implementation and operation of the system, as well as the majority of program usage.

The system is made up of 8,208 computational nodes using Intel Xeon Phi high performance processors with Knights Landing architecture that uses many-core processor technology. The nodes are connected by Intel® Omni-Path Architecture. Because of the progress in semiconductor and interconnect technology over the past five years, the system, which uses commercially available processors, has been able to achieve the highest level of performance in Japan.

The Oakforest-PACS system is being made available under various programs, specifically, the innovative Japan's High Performance Computing Infrastructure (HPCI) Initiative and those that are carried out individually by the two universities. As Japan's highest performance supercomputer resources for joint use, it will dramatically advance research and development in a variety of next-generation science and technology fields. In addition, it will not only be used for cutting edge computational science research, but also to develop talent in the computational science and high performance computing fields, contributing to the future development of each field. By implementing and operating this system, the University of Tokyo's Information Technology Center and the Center for Computational Sciences at the University of Tsukuba are making yet another contribution to society.