Voltaire, which makes scale-out data centre fabrics has spilt the beans on Japan's first 2.4-petaflop supercomputer project. Apparently it was so excited that it got a contract to provide 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switches for the TSUBAME 2.0.

Professor Satoshi Matsuoka of Global Scientific Information and Computing Centre said that the TSUBAME 2.0 will continue to push science forward by providing world-class supercomputer facilities that enable research and development to be completed and utilized more quickly than ever before.

The system is based around Intel Westmere-EP and Nehalem-EX CPUs. It is coupled with more than 4,200 of NVIDIA Tesla 20-series GPUs to provide extreme processing capabilities on each node.

He added that to capitalise on this new level of compute power, the boffins had to design a dual-rail, non-blocking fabric that can support throughput up to 80 Gb/s per node, employing two Voltaire 40 Gb/s InfiniBand connections on each node. This is where Voltaire's high-speed InfiniBand fabric were needed to achieve the highest throughput and lowest latency possible.

The project is being co-ordinated by NEC and the system will begin operation in autumn. The TSUBAME 1.0, will require only 200 square meters of floor space, a reduction by two-thirds, and will exhibit comparable power consumption thanks to numerous green technologies that will be incorporated.

The supercomputer will also be 12 times greater than the current fastest system in Japan, owned by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency. It will have more than 1,400 compute nodes, with 12 Grid Director 4700 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switches, 179 Grid Director 4036 edge switches and 6 Grid Director 4036E switches for high performance bridging to 10 GbE storage.

It will also use more than 3,000 solid-state drives (SSDs) for the world's fastest total data I/O throughput at 2/3 terabytes per second, augmented with DataDirect Networks storage system with over 7 petabytes of capacity and planned 8 petabytes of tape.

The operating system will include both Linux and Microsoft Windows HPC, and will also use cloud and virtual machine technologies in order provide flexible services to its over 2,000 users as well as facilitate advanced machine operation capabilities.