The National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology (QST) of Japan has selected a Cray XC50™ supercomputer to be its new flagship supercomputing system. The yet unnamed supercomputer will be the replace for the Bullx cluster known as Helios.
As it was already covered in this blog, the mission of Helios was completed as all its shut-down operations were finished in the beginnings of 2017. Helios achieved a peak performance of more than 1.5 Petaflop/s and was entirely dedicated to Fusion research.
The Cray XC50 supercomputer will be installed at the Rokkasho Fusion Institute in Japan and it is expected to deliver peak performance of over 4 Petaflops/s. The supercomputer will be entirely used for plasma physics and fusion technology research. Although the exact details of the machine are still not available, we can say that Cray XC supercomputers incorporate Intel® processors, NVIDIA® GPU accelerators and the Aries high-performance network interconnect for low latency and scalable global bandwidth.
The system is expected to be put into production in 2018 and it will be the largest supercomputer used specifically for nuclear fusion science in Japan.
Source: Cray