Japan Keeps Accelerating With Tsubame 3.0 AI Supercomputer

The Global Scientific Information and Computing Center at the Tokyo Institute of Technology has been at the forefront of accelerated computing, and well before GPUs came along and made acceleration not only cool but affordable and normal. But its latest system, Tsubame 3.0, being installed later this year, the Japanese supercomputing center is going to lay the hardware foundation for a new kind of HPC application that brings together simulation and modeling and machine learning workloads. The hot new idea in HPC circles is not just being able to run machine learning workloads side by side with simulations, but to use machine learning to further accelerate the simulation, and we have a future feature story underway, based on conversations with researchers at TiTech and at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where the "Summit" hybrid CPU-GPU system is being built for the US Department of Energy, about this very topic. Suffice it to say, the idea is to integrate machine learning into the simulation, to do some of the computationally intensive stuff in a new way. So, as part of a climate model, you teach the system using machine learning to predict the weather by watching movies of the weather, or in astronomy, you use machine learning to remove the noise from the signal to find the interesting bits of a star field.