Co-Design and System for the Supercomputer “Fugaku”

The supercomputer “Fugaku” is an exascale manycore-based parallel system developed as a Japanese national flagship supercomputer in the FLAGSHIP 2020 Project. While “Fugaku” was ranked first for several benchmarks such as TOP500, HPCG, HPL-AI, and Graph500 in 2020, the major design concept is the application-first concept by the co-design for power efficiency and high performance. We have designed an original manycore processor based on Armv8 instruction sets with the scalable vector extension, A64FX processor, with Fujitsu, our industry partner. The system consists of 158,976 nodes with 7.6 million cores in total and a theoretical peak of 537 Peta Floating-point Operations Per Second in double-precision floating points, connected by Tofu-D interconnect. The high performance computing (HPC)-oriented design enables an extremely good performance for memory-intensive workloads thanks to HBM2 memory with breakthrough power efficiency. In this article, we present the pragmatic practice of our co-design effort for “Fugaku” followed by an overview and the performance of “Fugaku.”