Fujitsu is planning a 10 PetaFLOPS supercomputer ready for delivery in 2011. This is a ten-fold increase of the most powerful supercomputer of today, Roadrunner. Ten PetaFLOPS equals 1016 floating point calculations per second, or 10,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second, a staggering amount of number crunches. The computer will be used by the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Japan, says Takumi Maruyama responsible for Fujitsu’s processor development at the Hot Chips Conference.
The system will use Fujitsu’s coming Sparc64 VIIIfx processor based on an octo-core architecture, double that of the current quad-core architecture. Maruyama says the processors will ship with 2 GHz clock frequency, 5 MB L2 cache and can do 128 GigaFLOPS at only 58 watt. It’s not just Fujitsu building supercomputers though, IBM that has five of the top ten systems at the Top500.org list, will also release a PetaFLOPS supercomputer in 2011, code-named Blue Waters.
The fastest system today is Roadrunner in Los Alamos, USA, with a peak performance of 1,105 PetaFLOPS.
