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- Newsgroups: comp.unix.large
- Path: sparky!uunet!ossi!news.fai.com!cliffc
- From: cliffc@news.fai.com (Clifford Chen)
- Subject: Fujitsu Unveils Its Supercomputing Strategy
- Message-ID: <Brx68s.A22@news.fai.com>
- Organization: Fujitsu America Inc.
- Date: Sat, 25 Jul 1992 00:48:28 GMT
- Lines: 135
-
- Fujitsu Supercomputer Statement of Direction
-
- FUJITSU UNVEILS ITS SUPERCOMPUTING STRATEGY
-
-
- (Washington, D.C. July 21, 1992) -- Fujitsu Limited today
- outlined its supercomputer development and marketing strategy at
- the 6th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing. As part
- of this announcement, Fujitsu disclosed its development of a
- powerful parallel supercomputer capable of peak processing speeds
- of more than 300 gigaFLOPS (300 billion floating point operations
- per second) using only a few hundred processors -- an unprecedented
- performance level.
-
- Central to Fujitsu's product strategy is a recognition that
- existing approaches to supercomputing, i.e. vector processing
- and parallel processing, each have their respective merits.
- Furthermore, Fujitsu has found that combining elements of both
- architectures, that is, coupling Fujitsu's expertise in vector
- processing technology with the growing promise of parallel
- processing, yields a third and even more powerful approach to
- supercomputing. This newly developed architecture provides a
- critical third element to Fujitsu's three-pronged supercomputer
- product strategy.
-
- Known for its VP and VPX series of vector supercomputers,
- Fujitsu has acquired a great deal of knowledge and experience in
- vector processing. Fujitsu has also gained expertise with its
- AP1000 system, a prototype highly parallel computing system based
- on scalar processing technology. The AP1000 has yielded important
- research results. Fujitsu's scientists have learned that parallel
- supercomputing requires a radically different approach to programming.
-
- Equally important, computational case studies have revealed
- that conventional vector processing, vector parallel processing,
- and parallel scalar processing each excel at different applications.
- In some cases, computational efficiency is improved through the
- parallelization and/or vectorization of an application. In other
- cases, the complexity of parallelizing software code makes
- conventional vector processing the best option.
-
- Having experimented with all three architectures,
- Fujitsu has developed a clear understanding of how to best serve
- the needs of supercomputer users. Fujitsu's research, including
- joint studies with users, has demonstrated that the third
- approach, namely vector parallel processing, is very efficient
- over a wide range of applications. Nevertheless, conventional
- vector supercomputers continue to provide superior performance
- for many computational applications. Therefore, Fujitsu is
- committed to advancing the state of vector supercomputing as well
- as parallel computing and plans to release succeeding generations
- of its VP and VPX Series.
-
- With this announcement Fujitsu reveals the development of a
- new generation of ultra-high performance systems based upon a
- parallel arrangement of vector processors.
-
- Fujitsu's highly parallel approach maximizes single
- processing unit performance, packing gigaFLOPS performance into
- each custom processor used in the parallel configuration. Each
- individual processor, which is the size of a large briefcase,
- delivers supercomputer performance in and of itself.
-
- With hundreds instead of thousands of processors, Fujitsu's
- strategic technology direction successfully addresses one of the
- most critical issues in the parallel computing arena: creating
- teraFLOPS power without the restrictive programming environment
- of today's massively parallel systems. This approach combines
- the optimal performance of parallel computing with the
- reliability and ease of programming of vector processing.
-
- Based on this highly vector parallel approach, Fujitsu's new
- supercomputer system, when introduced later this year, will offer
- the worldwide scientific and engineering community state-of-the-
- art computational capability to solve "grand challenge" issues
- such as global warming and ozone depletion as well as industrial
- and commercial computational problems such as large scale fluid
- dynamics, anti-cancer drug development, seismic data processing,
- and weather forecasting, for example.
-
- The key to Fujitsu's success in developing this vector
- parallel system is its far-reaching experience in designing and
- building conventional vector processors. The advantages of
- vector processing architecture are well proven, and by marrying
- this technology with the principles of parallel processing,
- Fujitsu has developed a practical, ultra-high speed computer.
- Fujitsu's approach has been to unite vector processors in a
- parallel architecture, while others have attempted to add vector
- features to existing parallel systems.
-
- In approaching the design of this system, Fujitsu did not
- rely on commodity, "off-the-shelf" processors, as do many of
- today's massively parallel systems. Each processor or processing
- element includes a vector and a scalar unit along with a main
- memory unit configured in a shared architecture. Fujitsu's
- unique distributed memory architecture affords maximum
- flexibility by allowing the configuration of memory and
- processing elements to match actual data processing requirements.
-
- "We plan to offer out customers the security and certainty
- of today's vector supercomputing environment, a universal UNIX
- operating system and commonly used FORTRAN programming language.
- The big benefit to customers will be that millions of dollars of
- software development assets can be preserved, without substantial
- modification, as customers move to parallel capabilities and
- teraFLOPS performance. We also expect to offer the 10 teraFLOPS
- performance level before the end of this decade," said
- Tadashi Sekizawa, Fujitsu's President.
-
- Fujitsu Limited is the world's second largest computer
- manufacturer and the largest in Japan. The company entered the
- supercomputer market in 1977 with its FACOM 230-75 APU and today
- offers its VP and VPX Series, a complete line of vector processor-
- based supercomputers. Today, Fujitsu ranks second worldwide
- in the number of supercomputer installations with more than 160
- around the globe.
-
- With more than $25 billion in revenues for the fiscal year
- ended March 31, 1992, Fujitsu invests more than 10 percent of its
- revenues annually on research and development to advance its
- three core technology areas of focus: electronic devices,
- computers and communication systems.
-
- # # #
-
- UNIX is a registered trademark of UNIX System Laboratories, Inc.
-
- For more information, contact:
- Margaret Lasecke
- Fujitsu America, Inc.
- 3055 Orchard Drive
- San Jose, California 95134-2022
- U. S. A.
- (408) 456-7606
-
-