Tsubame is a series of

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

s that operates at the GSIC Center at the Institute of Science Tokyo (Previously, at the

Tokyo Institute of Technology The Tokyo Institute of Technology () was a public university in Meguro, Tokyo, Japan. It merged with Tokyo Medical and Dental University to form the Institute of Science Tokyo on 1 October 2024. The Tokyo Institute of Technology was a De ...

) in Japan, designed by Satoshi Matsuoka.

Versions

Tsubame 1.0

The

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

-built Tsubame 1.0 began operation in 2006 achieving 85 TFLOPS of performance, it was the most powerful supercomputer in Japan and Asia at the time. The system consisted of 655

InfiniBand InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also used ...

connected nodes, each with a 8 dual-core

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

Opteron 880 and 885 CPUs and 32 GB of memory. Tsubame 1.0 also included 600 ClearSpeed X620 Advance cards.

Tsubame 1.2

In 2008, Tsubame was upgraded with 170

Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...

Tesla S1070 server racks, adding at total of 680 Tesla T10 GPU processors for

GPGPU General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, or less often GPGP) is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU), which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditiona ...

computing. This increased performance to 170 TFLOPS, making it at the time the second most powerful supercomputer in Japan and 29th in the world.

Tsubame 2.0

Tsubame 2.0 was built in 2010 by HP and

NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered at the NEC Supertower in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It provides IT and network solutions, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), Inte ...

as a replacement to Tsubame 1.0. With a peak of 2,288 TFLOPS, in June 2011 it was ranked 5th in the world. It has 1,400 nodes using six-core

Xeon Xeon (; ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same archite ...

5600 and eight-core Xeon 7500 processors. The system also included 4,200 of Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPGPU compute modules. In total the system had 80.6 TB of DRAM, in addition to 12.7 TB of GDDR memory on the GPU devices. Tsubame 2.0 ranked 4th in the world and 1st in Japan on the November 2010

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

list, the highest ranking until then.

Tsubame 2.5

Tsubame 2.0 was further upgrade to 2.5 in 2014, replacing all of the Nvidia M2050 GPGPU compute modules with Nvidia Tesla Kepler K20x compute modules. This yielded 17.1 PFLOPS of

single precision Single-precision floating-point format (sometimes called FP32 or float32) is a computer number format, usually occupying 32 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide dynamic range of numeric values by using a floating radix point. A floa ...

performance.

Tsubame-KFC

Tsubame KFC added oil based liquid cooling to reduce power consumption. This allowed the system to achieve world's best performance efficiencies of 4.5 gigaflops/watt.

Tsubame 3.0

In February 2017, Tokyo Institute of Technology announced it would add a new system Tsubame 3.0. It was developed with SGI and is focused on

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

and targeting 12.2 PFLOPS of

double precision Double-precision floating-point format (sometimes called FP64 or float64) is a floating-point arithmetic, floating-point computer number format, number format, usually occupying 64 Bit, bits in computer memory; it represents a wide range of numeri ...

performance. The design is reported to utilize 2,160 Nvidia Tesla P100 GPGPU modules, in addition to Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 processors. Tsubame 3.0 ranked 13th at 8125 TFLOPS on the November 2017 list of the TOP500 supercomputer ranking. It ranked 1st on the June 2017 list of the

Green500 The Green500 is a biannual ranking of supercomputers, from the TOP500 list of supercomputers, in terms of energy efficiency. The list measures performance per watt using the TOP500 measure of high performance LINPACK benchmarks at double-preci ...

energy efficiency ranking at 14.110 GFLOPS/watts.

Tsubame 4.0

Tsubame 4.0 became operational in June 2024. It was developed with HP, and consists of 240 nodes each with 2 AMD EPYC 9654 96 core processors, 768GiB of DDR5-4800 RAM, and 4 Nvidia H-100 GPUs. Double precision performance is ~5.5x higher than that of Tsubame 3.0 at 66.8 PFLOPS. On the November 2024 TOP500 list, Tsubame 4.0 ranked 36th in the world and 5th in Japan. Tsubame 4.0 is the first in the series to be operated by the Institute of Science Tokyo after its founding in October 2024.

References

External links

* {{commons category-inline, TSUBAME 3.0 GPGPU supercomputers Supercomputing in Japan