Installing the Highest Performing Supercomputer in Japan

In late 2016, The University of Tokyo, the University of Tsukuba, and Fujitsu Limited announced that the Oakforest-PACS supercomputer, built by Fujitsu and operated by the Joint Center for Advanced High Performance Computing (JCAHPC), officially became the highest performing supercomputer in Japan.

The installation features 70 racks with 8,208 liquid cooled nodes and has a peak performance of 25 petaflops. It was Asetek’s first installation liquid cooling Intel Xeon Phi high performance processors with (KNL) Knights Landing architecture. Hot water liquid cooling from Asetek enabled high-density in a compact physical footprint, with eight nodes per 2U of rack space.

The supercomputer will be used for cutting edge computational science research in addition to developing talent in the computational science and high performance computing fields, contributing to the future development of each field.

In November 2016, Oakforest-PACS was listed as the 6^th most powerful supercomputer in the world on the Top500 list and the 6^th most energy efficient supercomputer in the world on the Green500 list.

The video below shows the supercomputer being installed in the Information Technology Center on the University of Tokyo’s Kashiwa Campus. In just over 5 minutes, watch as the workers fill the near empty room with the 70 liquid cooled racks.