Supercomputing in exascale era gets empowered by Cray and Fujitsu

Fujitsu, the Japanese communication and information technology giant, recently teamed up with Cray to empower the exascale era with high-performance technologies. Cray is known for its prowess in supercomputers all over the globe. It is now developing one of the first commercial supercomputers that will be powered by Fujitsu A64FX Arm-based processor. This processor is preferred over others for its high-memory bandwidth (HBM) and it will have the support from the Cray CS500 supercomputer architecture as well as the programming environment.

Most noteworthy features

The special features offered by both tech giants make this high-bandwidth memory Arm processor a highly interesting product. Customers are already lining up to pick up the first slot as soon as it reaches the mainstream market. The list of most eager buyers includes names like RIKEN Center for Computational Science, University of Bristol, Stony Brook University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and a few others.

The partnership between Fujitsu and Cray will also include engineering projects right from planning and design phase to co-development and marketing. These projects will be capable of catering all customer demands in the supercomputing domain.

What makes this processor so special?

Most Cray clients that are lining up for this supercomputer are market leaders in their respective domains. Through this purchase, all these market players will gain a very strong edge over their biggest rivals. This new processor will take the market to new heights for it is the only product capable of delivering Arm SVE (Scalable Vector Extension) and HBM.

HBM2 offers exceptional transfer speeds that are much faster than DDR4 allowing A64FX maximum theoretical memory bandwidth that is much higher than 1 TB/s.

In Maker’s words

As Fred Kohout, the senior vice-president and CMO at Cray, the Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, says, “Our partnership with Fujitsu means customers now have a broader choice of processor technology to address their pressing computational needs. We are delivering the development-to-deployment experience customers have come to expect from Cray, including exploratory development to the Cray Programming Environment (CPE) for Arm processors to optimize performance and scalability with additional support for Scalable Vector Extensions and high bandwidth memory.”

Along with, Takeshi Horie, the Corporate Executive Officer and Vice Head of Service Platform Business Group at Fujitsu, adds, “It’s a pleasure to partner with Cray on building technologies for the next era of computing. Both companies have a strong legacy of supercomputing and vector processing. The A64FX Arm processor was designed to empower a wide range of data-intensive applications and is the world’s first CPU to adopt the SVE of the Armv8-A instruction set architecture, specifically extended for supercomputers.”