AMD and Sun Microsystems Inc. announced today at Supercomputing 2005 that the Tokyo Institute of Technology is creating Japan's largest supercomputer on a foundation of Sun. The system is based on Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers with 10,480 AMD Opteron processor cores. The system will total more than 50 trillion floating point operations per second.
Using Sun's N1 System Manager and N1 Grid Engine, the system will be provisioned to support the Solaris 10 operating system as well as the Linux operating environment. According to a joint statement from both AMD and Sun, the new system is intended to help science and engineering researchers dramatically increase their productivity. According to Satoshi Matsuoka, professor in charge of research infrastructure at the Global ScientificInformation and Computing Center at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, the system will be leveraged by a wide range of researchers who tackle complex problems ranging from analyzing the complex
molecular structure of proteins to nanoscience simulation of carbon nanotubes. He says that these types of tasks all tasks require exceptional computing power and experience working with supercomputers.The Tokyo Tech system marks Sun's largest high performance computing to date. Plans for the grid-based supercomputer are to expand it to more than 100 teraFLOPS by its operation in Spring 2006. It is expected to be one of the five largest supercomputers in the world as ranked by Top 500, a high-perfomance computing tracking project administered in part by both the University of Mannheim and the University of Tennessee.
