Aerospace Exploration Agency of Japan orders Fujitsu supercomputer

JAXA orders super computer capable of 135 teraflops

Fujitsu is best known by many as a small manufacturer of notebook computers and tablet. However, the Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Japan has tapped Fujitsu as the source of its new supercomputer.

The supercomputer ordered by JAXA will be based on the technical computing Fujitsu FX1 server. JAXA system will be fed by 3392 FX1 computer nodes that are combined to provide a theoretical peak performance of 135 teraflops.

The new supercomputer Fujitsu JAXA replacement of the current supercomputer called the Numerical Simulator III. According to Fujitsu, JAXA extensive use of advanced numerical simulation technology in the development of rockets, planes advanced space and transportation systems. The supercomputer will be used to literally rocket science.

Fujitsu JAXA said it will move from its current supercomputer to the new, in April 2008 and that the entire system will be installed and operational in April 2009. JAXA current supercomputer has a theoretical peak performance of a comparatively paltry 9.6 teraflops and features 3.6TB total memory.

The new supercomputer based FX1 offer an increase in performance of more than 15x the existing computer system. The new supercomputer also has 11 petabytes 100TB storage and memory total.

Each of the nodes FX1 (PDF) has a Fujitsu SPARC64 VII CPU based on 65nm technology running at 2.5GHz. Each processor has four cores and performance of 40 GFLOPS per CPU. The maximum memory capacity per node is 32 2213 W.

The fastest supercomputer in the world IBM’s Blue Water, will be installed at the University of Illinois. Blue water is expected to be completed in 2011 and is expected to be capable of petaflops.