NEC this week announced that it had been selected to develop a next-generation supercomputer for Japan's National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST). The machine will use Intel's Xeon 6900P processors, AMD's Instinct MI300A accelerators and will offer performance of around 40 PetaFLOPS. It will be mainly tasked with advancing nuclear fusion research.
The system is set to be installed at QST’s Rokkasho Institute for Fusion Energy in Aomori, Japan, and will include 360 NEC LX 204Bin-3 units powered by 720 Intel Xeon 6900P processors equipped with MRDIMM DDR5 memory and 70 NEC LX 401Bax-3GA units with AMD Instinct MI300A GPUs, reaching a combined theoretical performance of 40.4 PetaFLOPS. The CPUs and GPUs will take advantage of Giga Computing-developed liquid cooling to ensure consistent performance and high reliability.
"By integrating the Intel Xeon 6900P Series, the first server CPU to support MRDIMMs, and the first in Japan, we are delivering a leap in memory performance and bandwidth, an ideal choice for complex calculations and simulations required in fusion research," said Ogi Brkic, Vice President & General Manager, Go-To-Market Builders & Technology Acceleration Office, Sales & Marketing Group, Intel.
For storage, the supercomputer will feature DDN's ES400NVX2 solution, which has a total capacity of 42.2PB and features the Lustre ExaScaler file system. As for network infrastructure, the machine will use an InfiniBand setup with Nvidia's QM9700 switches. On the software side, the machine will use Altair PBS Professional software for workload management and a scheduler optimized for AMD's Instinct MI300A accelerators.
"We appreciate that NEC has selected AMD's Instinct MI300A and this choice is further proof that AMD's MI300 Series GPUs offer a compelling supercomputer accelerator solution," Jon Robottom, Corporate Vice President, Representative Director & General Manager, AMD Japan. "We believe that AMD innovation, together with NEC's advanced technological capabilities, will continue to make a significant contribution to research conducted at the QST and NIFS."
A performance level of 40.4 PetaFLOPS is 2.7 times greater than the two current systems at QST and the National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS), which will provide a significant boost for supercomputer-based simulations for fusion science research as well as AI, and Big Data applications.
The new supercomputer is set to be operational starting from July 2025.
