Fujitsu Supercomputer Selected for Australia's National Computational Infrastructure Project

Tokyo, Juni 15, 2012

Fujitsu today announces its selection to deliver and install a new supercomputer, as well as to establish a Collaboration with the Australian National University's (ANU) National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)(1) to provide high-end computational services to the Australian research community. The new x86 cluster-type supercomputer based on Fujitsu PRIMERGY servers will be deployed in a new datacentre in Canberra, Australia starting in mid-December 2012, with handover set to be completed in early 2013.

In addition to delivery and installation, the contract calls for collaboration on a number of research projects, particularly with regard to weather and climate modelling.

The new supercomputer has a theoretical performance of 1.2 petaflops(2) and a storage capacity of 12 petabytes. It is based on x86 cluster technology and consists of 50 racks containing 3592 PRIMERGY CX250 compute nodes equipped with 7184 CPUs in 898 PRIMERGY CX400 chassis.

Fujitsu elected to bid its PRIMERGY x86 technology to meet the ANU's stringent performance, efficiency, and benchmarking requirements. The innovative HPC design is based on industrial standard hardware, which will deliver improved price performance; access to a greater range of independent software vendor applications; and simplify the migration process of existing x86 applications.

The ANU and Fujitsu will jointly pursue various projects in computational science including weather, climate, disaster prevention and advanced use of supercomputing. This research, scheduled to extend over four years, will utilize the Fujitsu PRIMEHPC FX10 supercomputer(3), which improves upon Fujitsu's supercomputer technology employed in the world's fastest supercomputer, the K computer(4) as well as the new x86 cluster-type supercomputer. . Combining the supercomputing technologies offered by Fujitsu together with the advanced application expertise provided by Australian researchers will, it is anticipated, lead to the development of an even higher-performing supercomputing environment.

Commenting on the role of the new supercomputer, ANU Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian Young said: "The new supercomputer will provide Australia with a much needed capability to meet national challenges. It will take Australia's research to new levels in areas such as weather and climate modelling, computational chemistry, particle physics, astronomy, material science, microbiology, nanotechnology and photonics."

Mike Foster, Chief Executive Officer of Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand said: "Once completed, the NCI Supercomputer will be one of the largest and fastest computers in the world. This win confirms Fujitsu's ability to leverage its global resources to complement its strong capability in cloud services, application development and managed services at a local level. We are proud to be able to assist the ANU and NCI in playing its vital role as one of the leaders in Australian research."

Masahiko Yamada, President of Fujitsu's Technical Computing Solutions Unit commented: "Fujitsu's objective is to contribute to a prosperous future through the benefits of supercomputers. In order to accomplish this, we need the collaboration of other researchers and scientists worldwide. This is why we are so excited to deliver our HPC offerings and to work with the ANU on the NCI project. This collaboration should produce results in climate modeling and other fields that benefit Australia and the world."

Glossary and Notes

• 1. NCI : NCI is part of ANU and is jointly funded by the Federal Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research under its National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) program; the CSIRO; Bureau of Meteorology; Geoscience Australia; and the ANU.
• 2. 1.2 petaflops : 1.2 petaflops (1.2 × 1015 floating point operations per second)
• 3. PRIMEHPC FX10 supercomputer : PRIMEHPC FX10 × 1 rack (22.7 teraflops)
• 4. K Computer : The K computer was in 2011 twice judged to be the world's fastest supercomputer by the TOP500 list.