Cray has announced that the Center for Computational Sciences (CCS) at the University of Tsukuba in Japan has put another CS300 cluster into production – the second CS300 system unveiled at the University in the last six months. The new system, named ‘COMA (PACS-IX),’ which stands for Cluster Of Many-core Architecture processors, will join the previously announced High Accelerated Parallel Advanced system for Computational Science (HA-PACS) system, the University now has two petascale Cray cluster supercomputers.
COMA is the ninth generation of the PACS series of supercomputers at the University of Tsukuba, which has been conducting scientific research on its systems for more than 30 years. The COMA system utilizes Intel Xeon processors and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, and will provide the CCS user community with a powerful tool for performing research.
‘At this moment, COMA is the largest cluster system in Japan to employ Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors,’ said Taisuke Boku, chair of the administrative committee for computer systems at the Center for Computational Sciences at the University of Tsukuba. ‘With the sophisticated implementation of the Cray CS300 system, COMA occupies an incredibly small footprint for a petaflop supercomputing system. We are focused on accelerated computing technologies for scientific computing. It is quite interesting to now have the ability to research and compare the performance characteristics of two different types of accelerators – the GPUs on our HA-PACS system and the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors on our COMA system.’
Focused on promoting scientific discovery through the application of advanced computing technologies, the CCS supports computational scientific research in Japanese universities and institutes by operating advanced computing resources. The center performs research on critical issues in fundamental science, material science and environmental science by performing large-scale simulations and large-scale data analysis.
‘We are honored that one of Japan’s most prestigious high performance computing facilities, and a recognised leader in accelerated computing, has once again chosen a Cray cluster supercomputer to deliver breakthrough scientific results across a wide range of disciplines,’ said Mamoru Nakano, president of Cray Japan. ‘We look forward to continuing to build a collaborative partnership between CCS and their users. The addition of this new Cray system at the University is another example of our continued drive to expand our presence in Japan and across the broader Asia Pacific region.’
