Fujitsu completes design of exascale supercomputer, promises to productize it
Fujitsu and Japanese research institute Riken announced the design for the post-K supercomputer, to be launched in 2021, is complete and that they will productize the design for sale later this year.
The K supercomputer was a massive system, built by Fujitsu and housed at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Japan, with more than 80,000 nodes and using Sparc64 VIIIfx processors, a derivative of the Sun Microsystems Sparc processor developed under a license agreement that pre-dated Oracle buying out Sun in 2010.
It was ranked as the top supercomputer when it was launched in June 2011 with a computation speed of over 8 petaflops. And in November 2011, K became the first computer to top 10 petaflops. It was eventually surpassed as the world's fastest supercomputer by the IBM’s Sequoia, but even now, eight years later, it’s still in the top 20 of supercomputers in the world.