Cray and Fujitsu created the first-ever supercomputer on ARM processors with high-speed memory

In November, 2019 Cray and Fujitsu announced, according to the companies, the first-ever supercomputer on ARM processors with high-speed memory (HBM).

Willingness to install at itself this computer system was shown by several customers among whom — the Los Alamos national laboratory, Okridzhsky national laboratory, the Center of computer sciences RIKEN, the Stouni-Bruk university and University of Bristol.

Cray and Fujitsu announced, according to the companies, the first-ever supercomputer on ARM processors with high-speed memory (HBM)

The supercomputer received the Fujitsu A64FX ARM processor having support of memory of HBM2 and vector expansions of architecture of ARM (Scalable Vector Extensions, SVE). According to developers, high-speed memory is characterized by the capacity exceeding 1 TB/with, and support of ARM SVE technology increases performance in problems of artificial intelligence and analytics.

For interprocessor connection it is going to use the bus Torus Fusion (Tofu); two lines with a speed of 28 Gbps everyone are provided. There is also a PCIe 3.0 controller, it provides 16 lines. A64FX processors are issued at capacities of TSMC using 7-nanometer technology regulations. It is reported that the number of transistors on a crystal is 8.7 billion.

The first clients will be able to begin to use this supercomputer to the middle of 2020. More detailed technical characteristics of a system at the time of its announcement do not reveal. It is known that its performance will be exceeds 1 eksaflops.

It is expected that the new machine will be used for modeling of the complex three-dimensional systems — from weather cards and materials to nuclear power engineering and weapon.

For Cray it is unusual to use ARM processors — usually supercomputers of the company are equipped with solutions on architecture of x86, including Intel Xeon and AMD Epyc.^[1]

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