RIKEN Symposium “The Third Generation PC Clusters”

RIKEN Symposium, titled “The Third Generation PC Clusters", was held on March 12 in RIKEN Wako Institute, sponsored by RIKEN Advanced Center for Computing and Communication, and RIKEN Next-Generation Supercomputer R&D Center.

All the presentations (almost in Japanese) are now available from the RIKEN symposium program site.

The symposium was interesting to me since RIKEN reviewed their five year experiences about RIKEN Super Combined Cluster (RSCC) that was the seventh of TOP500 list in June, 2004 and will be transferred to next system, RIKEN Integrated Cluster of Clusters (RICC) to be operated from August, 2009. Aggregated computing capacity of RICC is estimated 100+ 106+ 64 TFLOPS, i.e., 270 TFLOPS according to Kurokawa-san’s presentation (the sixth presentation)

Relative to the Next-Generation Supercomputer (NGS) of Japan, a six floor building framework appears in Kobe Port Island (it looks like a Blue Waters building, and is higher than it), and prototyping and evaluation phase for NGS system units are scheduled this year. Along such schedule, the role of the RICC is enhanced to:
1. Provide application development environments for NGS
2. Provide HW/SW testing environments for post-NGS
3. Provide higher performance systems for current users
4. Develop new application areas of RIKEN,
according to Dr. Ryutaro Himeno, director of RIKEN Advanced Center for Computing and Communication.

In the afternoon sessions, there were three GPGPU presentations, such as performance evaluation with HIMENO benchmark. The RICC will attach 100 GPGPUs with a 100 node-multi purpose cluster system.

More details with many pictures are published by a mycom’s reporter in their web site (in Japanese).