JACHPC’s Oakforest-PACS Certified by TOP500 as Japan's Highest Performance Supercomputer

Date of activity: November 17, 2016

The University of Tokyo, the University of Tsukuba, and Fujitsu Limited announced that the Oakforest-PACS massively parallel cluster-type supercomputer, built by Fujitsu and operated by the Joint Center for Advanced High Performance Computing (JCAHPC), has achieved a LINPACK performance result of 13.55 petaflops to officially become the highest performance system in Japan, about 2.2 times the peak performance of the K computer. The Oakforest-PACS system was ranked in the November 2016 TOP500 list for supercomputer performance for its peak performance of 25 petaflops.
 
The Oakforest-PACS system is located in the Information Technology Center on the University of Tokyo’s Kashiwa Campus, but everything is carried out jointly by the University of Tokyo and the University of Tsukuba, including financing, implementation and operation of the system, as well as the majority of program usage.
 
The system is made up of 8,208 computational nodes using US-based Intel Corporation’s Intel Xeon Phi high performance processors with Knights Landing architecture that uses many-core processor technology. The nodes are connected by Intel’s Omni-Path architecture. Because of the progress in semiconductor technology and mutually interconnected network construction technology over the past five years, the system, which uses commercially available processors, has been able to achieve the highest level of performance in Japan.
 
With its revolutionary high performance computing infrastructure, the Oakforest-PACS system is available for various programs carried out individually by the two universities. As Japan’s highest performance supercomputer resource for joint use, it will dramatically advance research and development in a variety of next-generation science and technology fields. In addition, it will not only be used for cutting edge computational science research, but also to develop talent in the computational science and high performance computing fields, contributing to the future development of each field. By implementing and operating this system, the University of Tokyo’s Information Technology Center and the Center for Computational Sciences at the University of Tsukuba are making yet another contribution to society.