Fujitsu spins out supercomputer from K Computer

Fujitsu plans to start selling a supercomputer based on the world's fastest system, the Japanese K Computer.

The PrimeHPC FX10 Supercomputer, announced on Monday, will be available to buy worldwide in a variety of configurations from January. The system's architecture, which is modelled on the K Computer's, can theoretically scale to 23.2 petaflops of peak processing capacity, Fujitsu said.

If fully scaled, that would make the system almost three times as powerful as the K Computer. The Fujitsu-designed supercomputer was named the world's fastest in June by the Top500 benchmarking organisation, with a peak processing capacity of 8.16 petaflops.

PrimeHPC FX10 runs on Fujitsu's 16-core Sparc64 IXfx processors, the successors to the Sparc64 VIIIfx chips used in K Computer.

PrimeHPC can achieve 23.2 petaflops if equipped with 98,304 processing nodes across 1,024 racks, according to Fujitsu. It uses a 'Tofu' six-dimensional interconnect with a mesh/torus architecture to pass data between processors and memory. The minimum size of a system is four racks with 384 processors and 12TB of memory.

Pricing was not disclosed. The architecture will compete with Cray's XK6 'Titan' supercomputer system, which can theoretically scale to 50 petaflops, though the speed is contingent on faster x86 processors.