Japanese Riken gets supercomputer with almost 160,000 nodes with 48 Arm cores

Four hundred racks have been delivered to the Japanese research institute Riken for the Fugaku, a supercomputer with chips based on Arm. The system will have nearly 160,000 nodes with 48-core Arm chips.

The installation of Fugaku started in early December. All parts were delivered this week, Riken reports. The supercomputer should be ready for use in 2021. The system will then be used for research calculations, including research projects to combat covid-19.

The entire system will consist of 158,976 nodes with Fujitsu A64FX processors. These are Armv8.2-A SVE based processors with 48 cores for compute and 2 or 4 cores for OS activity. The chips run at 2GHz, with a boost to 2.2GHz and are combined with 32GB of HBM2 memory. The entire system must provide half exaflops of 64bit double precision floating point performance.

Fugaku is the nickname of Mount Fuji in Japan.