Mirantis Partners with Fujitsu to Build Supercomputer and Wide-Area Distributed Cloud System for High Performance Computing at Hokkaido University

Anticipated 2k% performance gain facilitates large-scale, interdisciplinary data science, and potentially artificial intelligence and machine learning

Mirantis and Fujitsu announced today that they have partnered to create the Information Initiative Center of Hokkaido University for an interdisciplinary, large-scale computing system with a theoretical peak performance of 4.0 petaflops, consisting of a supercomputer system and a cloud system. The system is expected to begin operations in December 2018.

Hokkaido University is a Japanese university that is extending the boundaries of education and research. The Information Initiative Center of Hokkaido University provides an academic information platform as a national joint-use facility for academic research by university faculty members, graduate students, and researchers throughout Japan.

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“OpenStack, due to its flexible software-defined infrastructure and robust APIs is perfectly suited for High Performance Computing (HPC),” said Boris Renski, CMO and co-founder, Mirantis. “Mirantis Cloud Platform (MCP), specifically tuned for the HPC use case, enables data science, advanced simulations, artificial intelligence and machine learning, IoT, Blockchain, and more, making it the perfect solution for Hokkaido University.”

The Information Initiative Center of Hokkaido University currently operates the Hokkaido University Academic Cloud, which is comprised of an interdisciplinary large-scale computing system that includes a supercomputer system and a cloud system, and petabyte-class data science unified cloud storage. To upgrade its interdisciplinary large-scale computing system to the Hokkaido University High-Performance Inter-Cloud, it is building both a supercomputer system that will improve the processing performance of the existing system by 2k%, and a nationwide wide-area distributed cloud system that can also be used for research on clouds and networks. It will further advance uses and research in such existing areas as scientific and technological simulations, AI, big data, and data science, and will provide an environment that can meet an even broader range of needs as people are trained to use the large-scale computing system for groundbreaking research.

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“The Hokkaido University High-Performance Inter-Cloud is a transformational research promotion platform for advanced research that organically integrates the super computer system and Inter-cloud system deployed nationwide, and accelerates various types of research projects such as artificial intelligence, big data, and the Internet of Things, as well as large-scale computational science simulations from universities, research institutions, and private sectors throughout Japan. For this very exciting and important project, we needed partners with track records to provide the best opportunity for success — Mirantis and Fujitsu,” said Dr. Masaharu Munetomo, Director, Information Initiative Center, Hokkaido University. “MCP delivers a flexible, tunable platform based on OpenStack and Kubernetes, with continuously delivered infrastructure-as-code to enable ongoing, rapid and reliable access to continued innovations by Mirantis and Fujitsu.”

“The Mirantis Cloud Platform, selected as Hokkaido University’s High-Performance Inter-Cloud, comes with Infrastructure-as-code to enable the safe and easy life cycle management of cloud infrastructure,” said Masahide Abe, head of the Mission Critical System Support Division, Platform Software Business Unit, Fujitsu Limited. “I am confident that the full Open Source cloud infrastructure software is the best choice for customers who expect agility and reliability from their system infrastructure. Fujitsu and Mirantis are together providing evolving cloud infrastructure software that incorporates advanced Open Source technologies, in combination with high quality services and support. We are working to realize customer growth, together with customers.”

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The new system will include:

Supercomputer system

• The new supercomputer system is a massively parallel computer system consisting of subsystem A, which is comprised of 1,004 PRIMERGY CX2550 M4 x86 servers that are equipped with the Intel® Xeon® Scalable family of processors, and subsystem B, which is comprised of 288 Fujitsu Server PRIMERGY CX1640 M1 x86 servers that are equipped with Intel® Xeon Phi™ processors. Each compute node is connected with Intel® Omni-Path Architecture, the latest high-speed interconnect⁾, for highly parallel computing performance.

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Cloud system

• The new cloud system has 64 x86 servers, including the Fujitsu Server PRIMERGY RX2540 M4 with NVIDIA® Tesla® V100, the latest GPU computing card, deployed to Hokkaido University and seven more in remote sites in the Kanto, Kansai, and Kyushu regions of Japan. Connecting these servers to the SINET5 academic backbone network makes it a nationwide wide-area distributed cloud system that extends from Hokkaido to Kyushu.
• The cloud platform uses MCP, with the OpenStack Pike release at its core, delivering the latest research environment.
• Designed to flexibly meet a wide variety of needs.
• With Fujitsu Software Technical Computing Suite, Fujitsu’s HPC middleware for large-scale systems, the system offers optimal controls and node occupancy for jobs, improving the convenience of a wide variety of anticipated operations. It also provides flexible electric power controls to conserve power by limiting the maximum electric power consumed by each user and turning the power for nodes on or off.

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