Next-Generation TSUBAME Will Be Petascale Supercomputer for AI

The Tokyo Institute of Technology, also known as Tokyo Tech, has revealed that the TSUBAME 3.0 supercomputer scheduled to be installed this summer will provide 47 half precision (16-bit) petaflops of performance, making it one of the most powerful machines on the planet for artificial intelligence computation. For Tokyo Tech, the use of NVIDIA's latest P100 GPUs is a logical step in TSUBAME's evolution. The original 2006 system used ClearSpeed boards for acceleration, but was upgraded in 2008 with the Tesla S1040 cards. In 2010, TSUBAME 2.0 debuted with the Tesla M2050 modules, while the 2.5 upgrade included both the older S1050 and S1070 parts plus the newer Tesla K20X modules. Bringing the P100 GPUs into the TSUBAME lineage will not only help maintain backward compatibility for the CUDA applications developed on the Tokyo Tech machines for the last nine years, but will also provide an excellent platform for AI/machine learning codes. In a press release from NVIDIA published Thursday, Tokyo Tech's Satoshi Matsuoka, a professor of computer science who is building the system, said, "NVIDIA's broad AI ecosystem, including thousands of deep learning and inference applications, will enable Tokyo Tech to begin training TSUBAME 3.0 immediately to help us more quickly solve some of the world's once unsolvable problems."