Japan’s K Computer surprised the world with a giant leap in floating point number encoding performance today and is approaching the estimated calculation capability of the human brain.
Japan’s Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science has taken the first spot on the prestigious list of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers. The K Computer sets a new record in the number of processing cores, power consumption as well as peak and sustained computational performance. The current installation is not yet completed, but is already rated a peak performance of 8.77 PFlop/s, which equals 8.77 quadrillion floating point operations per second (Flop/s). The maximum sustained performance is 8.2 PFlop/s, more than three times the sustained performance of Tianhe-1.
K integrates 68,544 2.0 GHz Fujitsu Sparc VIIIfx CPUs with 8 cores each, which makes K the first supercomputer with more than half a million cores (548,352). Each core is rated at a peak performance of 16 (double-precision, DP) GFlop/s, which makes the Sparc VIIIfx CPU slightly more capable than Intel’s latest Sandy Bridge CPUs. A quad-core Sandy Bridge chip is estimated to deliver about 100 DP GFlop/s. The Fujitsu processor is not a mainstream processor, but was developed specifically for supercomputing in mind. The 45 nm chip features are dedicated floating point instructions that enable the processor to run 8 floating point operations per clock cycle per core.
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