By Japan has always been a country bound on what is cutting in terms of technology. This nation’s tech capability has also held several records over the years.
In terms of supercomputing however, Japan has been lagging for a while. Today however we have a release of their latest achievements with a supercomputer.
The Japanese inaugurated Tsubame 2.0 last week and we’ve just got word on what’s “under the bonnet”. Tsubame 2.0 runs at 2.4 PFlops. This means that Tsubame 2.0 is Japan’s first petaflop-level supercomputer.
The Japanese supercomputer does have a few things extra to say. The 2.4 petaflops make Tsubame 2.0 rank in at number four in the world of supercomputers.
That may not be very impressive because it’s actually not even a podium finish but something about it is impressive. Tsubame 2.0 uses the same amount of electricity that Tsubame 1.0 used.
Despite this, the new Tsubame is 15 more powerful than its predecessor. It’s this nifty little feat that brings a title to the new supercomputer. Tsubame is now the world’s second most energy efficient processing monster.
Speaking of processing power, 2.4 Pflops is the peak of Tsubame 2.0 but it has a 1.2 Teraflops cap when it comes to maximum sustained performance.
So how is this possible? Well, behind the scenes and walls at Tsubame 2.0 we find no less than 1.408 computing nodes.
Tsubame 2.0
At the center of each of the 1.408 nodes we find a server from HP ProLiant SL390 that’s jammed full of Intel Xeon processors and Nvidia Tesla GPUs.
To put this into a more understandable perspective; each of the servers has three Nvidia Tesla GPUs. Every single one of these GPUs has 448 processing cores.
Don’t think the CPU figures are less impressive. Tsubame 2.0 uses 2.816 six-core Xeon 5600 processors running at 2.96GHz per core.
Another important aspect of such computing is the memory capability. Tsubame 2.0 is using a mix of DDR3 DRAM and solid state drives to keep things in check.
The final storage figures for the server’s backbone reach 80.6 Tbytes of DRAM for microprocessors and 12.7 Tbytes for GPUs. When turning your attention to SSD storage we find that reaches 173.9 Tbytes.
Every time I read the specs on it, it becomes more impressive.
And somehow, the Japanese can once again top things off because we’ve got some wind of what Tsubame 3.0 will be like.
Tsubame 3.0 exists at the moment only on paper but the specs claim that it should use the same amount of power as 2.0 only it should be running 30 petaflops.