Japan Selects Fujitsu to Build Exaflop Supercomputer by 2021

Japan has chosen Fujitsu to help it regain the top spot in the global supercomputer race with an exascale machine, which at 1,000 petaflops would be about 30 times faster than the leading supercomputer today.

The electronics giant said Wednesday it will work with the Riken research center to come up with a basic design for the supercomputer that would succeed the K computer, a machine they co-developed that grabbed the No. 1 spot in June 2011.

Riken has a mandate from Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) to develop a next-generation supercomputer, and said it chose Fujitsu following an open bidding process to develop a “post-K supercomputer.”

Fujitsu will initially collaborate with Riken on a basic design, working towards beginning operation of the post-K computer supercomputer by April 2021.

The Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science did not specify a performance speed or other characteristics of the machine, which it is calling the FLAGSHIP 2020 Project.

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Fujitsu Alone to Build Japanese NextGen HPC

Fujitsu Ltd. alone will build Japan's next-generation supercomputer after its two partners withdrew from a government-sponsored project to develop the computer for the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, Fujitsu and the institute said Friday.

The independent administrative institution known as RIKEN has decided to employ Fujitsu's scalar processing architecture for the supercomputer as NEC Corp. and Hitachi Ltd. (NYSE:HIT) have withdrawn from an earlier attempt to combine their vector architecture with the Fujitsu system, they said.

As originally planned, Fujitsu and RIKEN said they will complete the supercomputer at a facility in Kobe, Hyogo Prefecture, by fiscal 2012 ending in March 2013 under the 115.4 billion yen project. The total cost is expected to top the planned level.

The supercomputer is designed to use a 128-gigaflop central processing unit, the world's fastest at present, to achieve the world's highest performance of 10 petaflops.

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Note. Scalar, not vector. THey may have a faux vector architecture though.