Analysis on World’s Most Powerful Computer

Published:2012/3/8 21:50:00 Author:Li xiao na From:SeekIC

A paper at ISSCC in San Francisco has given us an insight to the world’s most powerful computer which is called K computer. It is made by Fujitsu and installed at the RIKEN advanced centre in Kobe. It is tested at 8.162Pflop, and it will reach 10Pflop when it is finished. This supercomputer is based on massive parallelism- in this case 548,352 cores from 68,544 eight-core scalar SPARC64 VIIIfx processors. There will be 700,000 cores in its final incarnation.

For massive-parallel machines, the interconnection is the big problem. The full potential of all the cores will be unlocked, if data can not travel freely. Each die in K computer is combined with a proprietary network called Tofu. Tofu is short for torus fusion. The six-dimensional mesh/torus topology of tofu can be separated into an arbitrary size of rectangular sub-meshes. The tofus also can be used for each sub-mesh.

Using the exceptionally high figure of 93% of processing potential takes 28 hours during the 8Pflop LINPACK. The reliability of the computer is an important element. Fujitsu has gone for copper rather than fibre for data backbones to make the reliability high. The ’FIT’ (failure in time) stands for one failure per billion devices hours, which should be known by us. With 200,000 cables, the K computer can reach 200 FITs. What is more, the power consumption can be reduced greatly by using electrical cables.

Lowering the temperature also can make the power consumption of processors low. For a chip with typical process parameters, the power consumption can be reduced by 7W when the temperature decreases from 85 to 30°C. More than 1MW power can be reduced in all.

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