Fujitsu Ltd. said Monday it has adapted technology from its K supercomputer, currently the world's fastest, into a commercial model aimed at companies and research institutes requiring high-level computing capabilities. The PRIMEHPC FX10, which has a theoretical processing performance of up to 23,200 trillion computations per second, will be marketed globally, the major high-tech company said.

Starting with a price of about ¥50 million for a single-rack model, Fujitsu can scale up the system to a 1,024-rack configuration, it said. The company plans to start shipping the new product in January and aims to sell 50 systems over the next three years.

The supercomputer improves on the technology used in the K computer, being developed jointly by the company and the government-backed research institute Riken. The K was ranked in June as the world's fastest computer.

"The world is facing complicated and difficult problems such as the environment, energy and food," Fujitsu Corporate Senior Executive Vice President Hideyuki Saso said at a news conference in Tokyo. "Through our supercomputer's high-speed processing for simulations, we'd like to contribute to resolving issues, such as in medical areas, including drug development and manufacturing," Saso said.

The system also leverages Fujitsu’s Tofu technology, an interconnect that offers high memory, bandwidth and scalability with 10 links, with each link offering high performance levels of 5 Gbps in both directions. The PrimeHPC FX10 also will come with Fujitsu’ original high-performance computing (HPC) middleware, called Technical Computing Suite, which includes a compiler and library aimed at ensuring high levels of performance for massively parallel applications. Scalability also can be enhanced through Fujitsu’s VisImpact technology, which enables customers to create a hybrid parallel programming model that combines threads with Message Passing Interface.


The system can scale up to 1,024 racks, which will contain 98,304 CPUs and 6 petabytes of memory, all delivering a peak performance of up to 23.3 petaflops. Fujitsu’s PrimeHPC FX10 also can come in configurations as small as four racks that offer up to 90.8 teraflops of performance.