RIKEN,
the University of Tsukuba, and Fujitsu Limited recently received top
ranking in all four benchmarks for the performance results of the “K
computer” at the 2011 HPC Challenge Awards. The awards were announced
this week SC11, the International Conference for High Performance
Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis taking place in Seattle,
USA. The first-place rankings in the HPC Challenge Awards were received
in the following four benchmarks used for evaluating the all-around
performance of a supercomputer: 1) Global HPL; 2) Global RandomAccess;
3) EP STREAM (Triad) per system; and 4) Global FFT.

According
to the K computer’s developers, the HPC Challenge Awards demonstrate
that, in addition to achieving successive top-place rankings on the June
and November 2011 editions of the TOP500 list measuring LINPACK
computational speed, the K computer is evaluated very highly in
all-around performance as a general-purpose supercomputer. The K
computer is currently under joint development by RIKEN and Fujitsu, whic
have been working together to develop the computer with the aim of
beginning shared use by November 2012 as a part of the High-Performance
Computing Infrastructure (HPCI) initiative led by Japan’s Ministry of
Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT).

The
HPC Challenge benchmarks are benchmark programs designed to evaluate
the overall performance of supercomputers in terms of processing
performance in 28 tests derived from frequently-used computational
patterns in the field of scientific computation. Among these, the four
challenging benchmarks are: 1) Global HPL (operating speed in solving
large-scale simultaneous linear equations); 2) Global RandomAccess
(random memory access performance in parallel processing); 3) EP STREAM
(Triad) per system (memory access speed under multiple loads); and 4)
Global FFT (total performance of Fast Fourier Transform). The HPC
Challenge Class 1 Awards are awarded to the top-ranked performance on
each of these four benchmarks.

The
University of Tsukuba contributed extensively to increasing the
computational speed for the Global FFT benchmark. As a result, the
performance results of the K computer were submitted to the Class 1
award category.

The top three rankings achieved on the four benchmarks for the HPC Challenge Class 1 Awards for 2011 are as follows:

The
HPC Challenge Class 1 Awards evaluate the performance of supercomputers
from four different angles, and the K computer delivers world-class
performance on all four benchmarks.

 

With
the understanding that its use would be widely shared by researchers
and engineers inside and outside RIKEN from the very start, the
development of the K computer has proceeded with the aim of creating a
supercomputer that combines superior computational performance with the
versatility that enables it to run applications for a wide range of
fields. The HPC Challenge results demonstrate the versatility of the K
computer and the all-around high performance levels it delivers as a
supercomputer.

TOP500 list

HPC Challenge Benchmark

RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science

Fujitsu’s website on the K computer