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Fujitsu Picks 64-Bit ARM For Post-K Supercomputer (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: At the International Supercomputing Conference 2016 in Frankfurt, Germany, Fujitsu revealed its Post-K machine will run on ARMv8 architecture. The Post-K machine is supposed to have 100 times more application performance than the K Supercomputer -- which would make it a 1,000 PFLOPS beast -- and is due to go live in 2020. The K machine is the fifth fastest known super in the world, it crunches 10.5 PFLOPS, needs 12MW of power, and is built out of 705,000 Sparc64 VIIIfx cores.InfoWorld has more details.
As I understand it the benefit of a supercomputer is BUS speed (getting data between the CPU caches quickly) for massively parallel computing tasks.
Well, more latency than raw speed. And that's a question of the interconnect. The old SPARC chips had (and the ARM chips will have) the interconnect in the CPU die for minimum latency.
What I don't understand is why there are so few hybrids using parallel GPU processing (2x512x8/16/32GB) to achieve the same tasks,
A GPU basically couples a lot of FPU grunt with a really simple processor. The K-computer had custom CPUs which had somewhat simple (compared to Xeons) processors with huge vector floating point units attached, which achieves much the same effect. You don't get quite as much FPU grunt for the money, but you get something easier to program and since it's part of the CPU, it also connects straight to the embedded interconnect.
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