Fujitsu Runs Prototype of Ten Petaflop Supercomputer and Wants Restart of Project

Fujitsu Ltd. (6702) on Wednesday successfully operated a prototype of its next-generation supercomputer, in spite of a government panel’s decision to freeze funding for the project.

The Ministry of Science and others are calling for the project to be continued, and Fujitsu says it is ready to start production as soon as it gets the green light.
The electronics manufacturer has already developed a trial CPU especially for the supercomputer. Plans for the actual supercomputer call for some 20,000 circuit boards and approximately 80,000 CPUs. The prototype connected a few dozen boards — each of the boards used four CPUs.

Fujitsu has been receiving over 10 billion yen in financial aid from the government through the research laboratory Riken. But Fujitsu has shouldered almost twice that amount on its own. If the next-generation supercomputer is brought online in 2012 as scheduled, Fujitsu plans to develop its CPUs for use in smaller supercomputers and corporate servers