Fujitsu installs world's largest private enterprise supercomputer system for Toyota Motor Corp.

TOKYO, 9 March 2000 -- Fujitsu Limited today announced that it has received an order from Toyota Motor Corporation for a multi- processor VPP5000 Series HPC Server -- the world's fastest vector supercomputer -- which it has installed and will be fully operational later this month.

The Fujitsu VPP5000 system selected by Toyota comprises 30 vector processing elements (PEs)*1 and has a theoretical maximum performance of 288 gigaflops (GFLOPS)*2. With 320 gigabytes of memory installed, it will be the world's largest supercomputer system installed in a private enterprise.

Replacement
Toyota has previously used a Cray Research supercomputer for crash analysis and vibration analysis, and a Fujitsu VPP300 system for fluid analysis and press analysis. The installation of the Fujitsu VPP5000 supercomputer will allow all these analytical tasks to be integrated into the new system.

Moreover, the Fujitsu VPP5000 system is expected to help greatly reduce the time required for carrying out advanced crash safety, ride comfort and environmental impact analyses, tasks that have become increasingly burdensome in the new car development process. In so doing, the system will help Toyota further improve vehicle performance, while contributing to significant reductions in development costs and time.

In tests of Toyota's analytical applications, Fujitsu's VPP5000 system demonstrated very high performance, topping previous processing speeds by a factor of five. In addition, the software vendors who are providing the analytical applications are collaborating closely with Fujitsu to implement comprehensive system support.

400 sold worldwide
Fujitsu has sold more than 400 supercomputer systems worldwide.

Such systems are being used by a wide range of users, which include not only automobile manufacturers but also makers of electrical machinery, users in the heavy industry and construction fields, as well as universities and research institutes. Fujitsu is currently the vector supercomputer market leader in Japan and ranks second worldwide.

According to Fujitsu, the installation of the VPP5000 system for Toyota reflects growing demand for analytical high-performance computing systems in the automotive industry, a segment toward which Fujitsu intends to expand its sales activity.

Fujitsu's VPP5000 Series supercomputer has a maximum performance of 9.6 gigaflops per each processor, and has the world's fastest vector CMOS processor. The series is at the leading edge of supercomputer technology, with scalability to 512 processors, and maximum performance of 4.9 teraflops (TFLOPS)*3.

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