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Advanced Technical Computing Solutions

2008-10 (Vol.44, No.4)

This issue introduces some of Fujitsu's activities and achievements that span a wide range of science and technology themes including: 1) Development of application systems in the fields of space, astronomy, and nuclear power; 2) Development of large-scale technical computing systems in support of R&D activities and user-support technologies to make these systems easy to use, operate, and manage; 3) Deployment of simulation technologies for research, design, and development work that uses CAE packages in manufacturing.

2008-10 (Vol.44, No.4) Contents

1. Preface (473 KB): From the launch of its computer business up to the present, Fujitsu has been accumulating much technology while responding to the suggestions and needs of its customers in diverse science and technology fields such as space, aviation, meteorology, nuclear power, astronomy, and computer-aided engineering (CAE). Fujitsu takes pride in its overall expertise in system-development and hardware/software technologies that has been accumulated over the long term based on the guidance received from its customers. To the best of its ability, Fujitsu hopes to contribute to the further expansion of science and technology. ---[Koichi Hironishi, Corporate Senior Executive Vice President]

Social Systems Development Technologies

2. System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information Network System (1.30 MB ): The System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information (SPEEDI) network system is a computer system capable of rapidly predicting the effect that radioactive materials will have on the surrounding environment if there is a massive release of radioactive materials from a nuclear facility. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology consigns the operation of the SPEEDI network system to the Nuclear Safety Technology Center (NUSTEC). NUSTEC has developed the main functions of the SPEEDI network system and Fujitsu provided continuous support with regards to the system construction, operation and maintenance, such as the introduction of servers and improvement of networks. This paper describes the current status of the development and operation of the SPEEDI network system and Fujitsu's approach to supporting this system. ---[Makoto Misawa, Fumio Nagamori]

3. Development of Management Systems for Nuclear Power Plant of Hokuriku Electric Power Company (1.43 MB ): Hokuriku Electric Power Company has been operating the Shika Nuclear Power Station that it constructed in Shika town, Ishikawa prefecture, for over 15 years since bringing Unit 1 of this plant online in July 1993. In addition to electricity generation, maintenance and inspection tasks constitute a big part of operating a large-scale nuclear power plant, and in recent years, problems at power stations in the nuclear power industry have led to several revisions of nationally regulated maintenance and inspection systems. This paper describes the background, objectives, development method, and features of the Maintenance Management System and Maintenance History Management System that make effective use of information technology to promote safer and more efficient maintenance work at large-scale nuclear power plants. ---[Tatsuaki Nakamura, Junichi Hasunuma, Shintaro Suzuki]

Space and Astronomy Systems Development Technologies

4. Technology of Precise Orbit Determination (988 KB): Since 1971, most domestic orbit determination systems have been developed by Fujitsu and its technology is highly evaluated by people involved in the field. In the mid-1990s, with the increased precision and sophistication of satellite Earth observations there was a need for greater accuracy in determining orbits that could not be provided by conventional systems. Thus, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA; formerly known as the National Space Development Agency of Japan) has planned the development of a Global and high accUracy Trajectory determination System (GUTS), which uses GPS and satellite laser ranging (SLR) technology. Fujitsu developed the core technology for this and operated the system. Furthermore, Fujitsu has been engaged in the operation of GUTS and is committed to maintaining and improving the precision of orbit determination technology through continuous improvement of this system.
This paper introduces the overview of the GUTS, core technologies related to orbit determination developed by Fujitsu and the current situation with regards to derived precision of orbit determination. It also describes the overview of a precise positioning experiment system based on our experience of using the core technology of GUTS. ---[Seiji Katagiri, Yousuke Yamamoto]

5. Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT) Ground Systems (659 KB): The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is an independent administrative agency responsible for the development and utilization of space and R&D in the aviation field. The mission of JAXA's Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT) is to obtain basic data on global warming by monitoring greenhouse gases, and its launching is scheduled during fiscal 2008. Fujitsu's operational know-how accumulated over many years of building onboard satellite systems and satellite ground systems, and its software development technologies and computer hardware have been applied in GOSAT ground systems. This paper examines general satellite ground systems, the ground systems for GOSAT, as well as the systems, computers and middleware for which Fujitsu is responsible. The paper also describes the ground systems for determining orbits and planning observation in particular detail, given Fujitsu's major contribution to such systems. ---[Masato Yokomizo]

6. Monitor and Control System for ACA Correlator Based on PRIMERGY for ALMA Project (910 KB): The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan is constructing a large interferometer called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) on a plateau near the Atacama Desert in Chile at an elevation of about 5000 m, in cooperation with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory of the USA and the European Southern Observatory. In cooperation with FFC Limited, Fujitsu is taking charge of development of the Atacama Compact Array (ACA) correlator used in correlation processing of data collected with the interferometer. Fujitsu is also charged with developing the monitor and control system based on Fujitsu's Linux PRIMERGY servers. The PRIMERGY RX300 S3 used for this system must operate stably in a severe environment at an elevation of about 5000 m and under atmospheric pressure of about 0.5 atm. We employed a diskless system for stable operation, thus making the system reliable even at low atmospheric pressure. We also conducted long-time running tests in an environment similar to the Atacama high-altitude environment, and adopted a remote maintenance system in order to make error handling and recovery much easier. This paper briefly introduces the ALMA project, and then describes the means of stable monitor and control system operation. ---[Katsumi Abe, Sachiko Kawase, Mitsuhiro Moriya]

Massive Server/Storage Systems Development and User-Support Technologies

7. JAXA Supercomputer Systems with Fujitsu FX1 as Core Computer (847 KB): In April 2009, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will deploy an integrated supercomputer system called JAXA Supercomputer Systems (JSS) using the Fujitsu FX1 technical computing server as the core computer. JSS consists of a massively parallel supercomputing system, storage system, large-scale shared memory system, and remote access system. It features outstanding application-execution performance, large-capacity/high-speed storage, and remote access. This paper outlines JSS and describes its features. ---[Takayuki Abe, Tomohide Inari, Ken Seki]

8. Super-Kamioka Computer System for Analysis (717 KB): The Institute for Cosmic Ray Research (ICRR) of the University of Tokyo newly established the Kamioka Observatory in 1996, and has continued to observe the elementary particles known as neutrinos by using the Super-Kamiokande Neutrino Detection Equipment. This equipment contains a 50 000-ton ultrapure water tank measuring 39.3 meters in diameter, 41.4 meters in height, and located 1000 meters underground. A total of 11 129 photomultiplier tubes (PMTs, 50 cm in diameter) are mounted on the inner wall of the tank. The Kamioka Observatory continues observation 24 hours a day, 365 days a year in order to detect neutrinos observable only for 10 seconds from a supernova explosion which may occur once every dozens of years. The current size of total accumulated data is nearly 350 TB. In February 2007, Fujitsu installed a computer system (known as the "Super-Kamioka Computer System for Analysis") using mass storage disk drives for saving and rapidly accessing the observed data. This paper describes the configuration of the Super-Kamioka Computer System for Analysis, explains how data is managed and rapidly accessed, and how throughput performance is improved. ---[Akira Mantani, Yoshiaki Matsuzaki, Yasushi Yamaguchi, Kouki Kambayashi]

9. Introduction of Supercomputer System for DNA Data Bank of Japan (696 KB): The Center for Information Biology and DNA Data Bank of Japan (CIB-DDBJ) at the National Institute of Genetics (NIG) has joined forces with GenBank (USA) and EMBL (Europe) to form the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC) and make their databases accessible to researchers over the Internet. In parallel with advances made in the life sciences, the INSDC databases are increasing rapidly in size by 30–50% annually. Moreover, a large-scale computer system for constructing and releasing them and providing search and analysis services has become necessary. Important requirements of such a system will include ongoing enhancements to system performance and capacity and support for software evolution. This paper describes a new supercomputer system that went into operation in March 2007. It meets a variety of difficult requirements including support for a rapidly growing database, provision of high-speed and stable search/analysis services, smooth migration from the old system, compatibility with existing user assets, high reliability, and support for security. This paper also introduces the contributions that this new system is making to life sciences research both inside and outside Japan. ---[Hideaki Sugawara, Hiroaki Yamada, Hisahito Yamada]

10. Massive Parallelization of First Principles Molecular Dynamics Code (877 KB): PHASE is a first principles molecular dynamics simulation program for explaining and predicting various properties of semiconductors and metals through electron-state calculations based on quantum dynamics. Its code was developed by the Revolutionary Simulation Software project sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), and Fujitsu has been participating in the development. As part of the recent trend toward large-scale computing, the need for simulating tens of thousands of atoms has been increasing, and to this end, there is a need for high-speed massively parallel processing on tens of thousands of central processing units (CPUs) simultaneously. This, in turn, requires that simulation programs be converted to massively parallel code to support such highly parallel operations. In this paper, we describe the method that we used to massively parallelize the PHASE code; it is a method for achieving massive parallelization of a two-dimensional decomposition of kernel sections having high computational load in large-scale problems. We show that the amount of data transferred between CPUs (processes) here is small compared with the computational complexity, indicating that the performance for massively parallel processing should be high. ---[Hidemi Komatsu, Takahiro Yamasaki, Shin-ichi Ichikawa]

11. HPC Solutions for the Manufacturing Industry (1.01 MB ): The most important requirement of a high performance computing (HPC) system, commonly known as a supercomputer, has traditionally been computational performance. Users have had to be familiar with advanced operations in order to make efficient use of high-priced and high-performance hardware. In recent years, however, there has been a shift toward low-cost HPC systems based on a general-purpose architecture such as personal computer clusters. As a result, the use of HPC systems is now spreading among users specializing in computational science research to the design and development departments in the manufacturing industry that promote virtual prototyping (simulation) to reduce development costs. These trends have generated a need for solutions that enable users to operate and manage HPC systems easily and perform design and development work efficiently. This paper explains HPC Portal, a Web-based tool for using HPC systems, System Administrator Portal, an operation and management tool, and SynfiniWay, a workflow tool. It also gives examples of solutions using these tools. ---[Koichiro Suzuki, Nobuhiro Uchida, Hideaki Kuraishi, John Wagner]

Computer Simulation Application Technologies

12. Crash Simulation of Large-Number-of-Elements Car Model by LS-DYNA on Highly Parallel Computers (755 KB): The analysis of car crashes by computer simulation has become an indispensible tool for shortening automobile development time and lowering costs. To shorten development time even further, researchers have endeavored to shorten the time needed for creating analysis models, and it is now becoming possible to create analysis models in a short time without manual work. However, to obtain a practical level of accuracy in analysis when creating an analysis model automatically, one needs a level of detail more than ten times that of analysis models currently being used by automobile companies, but the time taken to perform such an analysis is impractical. To resolve this problem, we investigated the possibility of performing practical analysis by highly parallel computing on a parallel computer. This paper explains the need for large-number-of-elements crash analysis at automobile companies and describes the highly parallel execution with up to 512 processors of a 10-million-element analysis model using the nonlinear dynamic structured analysis program LS-DYNA. The technical information obtained from these simulations, measures for improving processing speed, and future research issues are presented. ---[Kenshiro Kondo, Mitsuhiro Makino]

13. Electromagnetic Wave Simulation Software "Poynting" (1.59 MB ): The analysis of electromagnetic behavior by computer simulation has become quite active in recent years. In the research and development of electronic devices, electromagnetic analysis tools have become indispensable for shortening development times and reducing costs. This is because the research and development of microwave devices has intensified with the rapid spread of mobile communications. Moreover, as the frequencies of electrical signals in electronic circuits have risen, it has become necessary to examine electromagnetic behavior and deal appropriately with the leakage of electromagnetic waves. To meet this simulation need, Fujitsu has developed "Poynting", an electromagnetic wave simulation software package that it markets and supports. This paper describes Poynting's basic functions, parallel computation function, computer-aided design data conversion functions, and function for linking its simulation with a circuit simulator and presents Poynting calculation examples for a patch antenna, meander line, and printed circuit board. ---[Takefumi Namiki, Yoichi Kochibe, Takatoshi Kasano, Yasuhiro Oda]

14. Innovation in Drug Discovery through Information Technology (592 KB): Traditional drug discovery begins by identifying a biological substance (target protein) related to a disease and finding small chemical compounds that can control that function in a library of known chemical compounds. This limits the search space from the start, making it difficult to create chemical compounds with new structures (new drugs). In recent years, improved performance in computer processing has made it possible to research and develop drugs using computers and information technology (IT) in a process called "IT-based drug design" that goes beyond existing chemical compounds and expands the search space dramatically. It uses the three-dimensional structures of proteins and chemical compounds and molecular simulations to enable the design of drug candidates that include unknown virtual substances. This paper provides an overview of IT-based drug design that makes breakthroughs in drug design possible through exhaustive, high-speed search techniques and molecular simulations. ---[Shunji Matsumoto]

15. Activities for HPC ISV Applications (673 KB): Computer simulations for research and development are performed widely in universities, institutes and industries. For these simulations, High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms are often used and various overseas and domestic Independent Software Vendor (ISV) applications are also used. Therefore, Fujitsu promotes enabling and optimization of ISV applications for Fujitsu's HPC platforms and provides troubleshooting support for customers who use ISV applications on Fujitsu's HPC Platforms, and by arranging five ISV application support bases, Fujitsu has given such support with a global support formation.
This paper introduces Fujitsu's HPC platforms as well as the performance characteristicsof HPC ISV applications, the details of customer support and the support formation for HPC ISV applications. ---[Takashi Fukunaga]

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