Osaka University Partners with NEC to Launch Cloud-linked Supercomputer System
The Cybermedia Center of Osaka University, in collaboration with NEC Corporation has declared that they will introduce a new cloud-linked High-Performance Computing (HPC) and High-Performance Data Analysis (HPDA) supercomputer system from NEC. This will replace the existing system provided by NEC and is scheduled to commence operation in May 2021.
The new supercomputer system is composed of 1,520 general-purpose CPU nodes, each of which is a state-of-the-art general-purpose computational node with a 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor (codename Ice Lake) featuring Intel Deep Learning boost technology, 42 GPU nodes, each of which is equipped with eight NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs that accelerate workload for AI, data analytics, HPC, and visualization and 36 VECTOR nodes, each of which features eight NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA units that allow faster and highly efficient simulation of weather, seismic, hydraulic, and other phenomena.
The new system is a hybrid supercomputer system that can deliver a theoretical performance of higher than 16 petaflops, centered on a storage appliance equipped with DDN EXAScaler high-performance parallel file systems from DataDirect Networks, which provides 20 petabytes as a large-capacity data area and 1.2 petabytes as a high-speed data area.
NVIDIA Mellanox HDR InfiniBand provides high speed, low latency, and smart connectivity between the nodes. The general-purpose CPU nodes are set to become the largest computational resource in Japan as a supercomputer system equipped with Ice Lake.
Furthermore, the new supercomputer system is notable not only as a computing resource and data storage but also for tailor-made functionality that allows researchers to dynamically deploy and utilize the software stack of their choice
The Cybermedia Center at Osaka University has named the new supercomputer system SQUID (Supercomputer for Quest for Unsolved Interdisciplinary Data science) to address unsolved interdisciplinary data science challenges for researchers supporting academia and industry in Japan.
The Cybermedia Center, Osaka University will now work in cooperation with NEC, Intel, NVIDIA, DDN, Cloudian, Oracle Japan, and Microsoft Japan to construct the new supercomputer system for cloud-linked High-Performance Computing and High-Performance Data Analysis that works in conjunction with the cloud.
