The K computer maintains No.1 position in world ranking
13 January 2012 (Volume 7 Issue 1)
The team of researchers behind RIKEN’s K computer were awarded first place in the TOP500 list of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis
Jointly developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu, the K computer — a new supercomputer named after the Japanese word kei, which represents the unit ‘quadrillion’ or 10 peta — took first place in the 38th TOP500 list announced at the 27th International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis in November, 2011. This is the second time for the K computer to take first place, having also been ranked number one in the TOP500’s June 2011 listing.
In August, 864 computer racks for the K computer — comprising a total of 88,128 interconnected central processing units — were installed, bringing the system to its final configuration. Basic operation tests and design-performance checks were then undertaken in October using the LINPACK benchmarking program. Under test conditions, the K computer performed a remarkable 10.51 petaflops (10.51 quadrillion floating point number operations per second) with a 93.2% operating efficiency.
In addition to its impressive LINPACK performance, the K computer also took four top accolades at the High Performance Computing (HPC) Challenge Class 1 Awards, which evaluate the overall performance of supercomputers.
RIKEN and Fujitsu display their TOP500 certificate as the K computer claims the number one spot of the TOP500 listing
In other good news, a group comprising researchers from RIKEN, the University of Tsukuba, the University of Tokyo, and Fujitsu was awarded the annual Gordon Bell Prize for Peak Performance, which honors outstanding achievement in HPC. The prize recognizes the team’s innovative work on the computation of electron states of individual atoms within silicon nanowires. Fast becoming an attractive core material for next-generation semiconductors, the silicon nanowires were used by the team to verify the computational performance of the K computer.
To cap off a tremendous year, the K computer also received a prize from the popular online information resource, HPCwire, winning the HPCwire Editors’ Choice Award in the Top Supercomputing Achievement category.
