A few weeks ago, Intel and AMD joined forces so that the x86 architecture continues to evolve in the coming years and does not remain stagnant as it is today, where there has been little improvement. This is not the only collaboration between both companies, at least directly since Japan is counting on both companies to create a new supercomputer.
Japan plans to begin construction of a supercomputer for the National Institute of Quantum Science and Technology. To carry out this task, it has trusted the Japanese company NEC.
After leaving the world of telephony, the Japanese company NEC has focused on IT and network technology, quickly adapting to variations and new market demands without neglecting the environment.
New supercomputer with 40.4 PetaFLOPS
NEC to supply 360 NEC LX 204Bin-3 server platforms managed by 720 processors Intel Xeon 6900P equipped with DDR5 MRDIMM memory and 70 platforms of the NEC LX 401Bax-3GA model with 280 GPUs AMD Instinct MI300A.
So that the heat generated during operation is not a problem, the cooling tasks fall to the company Giga Computing, which uses liquid cooling. The power of theoretical performance based on hardware from NEC, Intel and AMD is 40.4 PetaFLOPS.
This level of performance is 2.7 times higher than that currently used by the two systems at the National Institute for Fusion Sciences and the National Institute for Quantum Science and Technology. The main use that will be given to this equipment is to advance the field of fission science, AI applications and Big Data.
Regarding storage, this supercomputer will have the DDN company through the ES400NVX2 with a total capacity of 42.2 PB and that uses the Luster ExaScaler file system.
The software used by this supercomputer and which is responsible for managing workloads and optimizing the performance of AMD accelerators is Altair PBS Professional in combination with the bus InfiniBand along with NVIDIA QM9700 (NVIDIA could not be left out of this project and had to collaborate, even to a lesser extent).
If the established forecasts are met, the new supercomputer with Intel processors and AMD accelerators will be put into operation in July 2025. This supercomputer will be assembled at the facilities of the National Institute of Quantum Science and Technology in Aomori Prefecture.
Almost 60% of the energy produced in Japan comes from more than 50 nuclear facilities spread throughout the country. Due to its importance, the country largely depends on it, nuclear energy is a state issue. With this new supercomputer, Japan wants to advance research in the field of nuclear fission, specifically in the manufacture of DEMO reactors that do not leave any carbon footprint.
