Japanese monster manifests new PETAFLOP POWER

Japan's ATERUI supercomputer has had its capacity doubled, leading the National Astronomical Observatory (NAO) of Japan to claim that it's currently word's the most power astronomical HPC facility.

At Japan's Centre for Computational Astrophysics, ATERIU was already a top-100 machine, but the NAO says the CPU-replacement took it from 502 teraflops to 1.058 petaflops.

The Cray XC30 formerly operated on Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPUs, which were swapped out for E5-2690s. That upped the cores-per-CPU from eight to 12, tripling the performance of each node from 332 gigaflops to 998 gigaflops. Memory per node was also doubled from 64 GB to 128 GB.

The upgrade let the facility cut the number of cabinets from eight to six while still upping the total number of cores from 24,192 to 25,440.

ATERUI provides astronomical analysis and simulation. Examples the NAO provides for the system include simulating the high-energy physics that are observed in supernovae and binary neutron stars.

The extra power and memory also mean the super will be able to run simulations in higher resolution, giving insights into the fine structure of celestial objects. ®