1. Contact: Hirofumi Amano at Kyushu Universityamano@cc.kyushu-u.ac.jp http://www.cc.kyushu-u.ac.jp/ Mission 40 Years of HPC Services Though the R. I. I. T. is a newly-established institute (founded in 2007), its computing services have a long history, nearly 40 years. It was formerly known as "Computer Center" or "Computing and Communications Center". Since the early days of the Computer Center, it has been one of the seven national supercomputer centers in Japan. High-Performance Computing is now an essential tool for various fields of science. It shows us what we cannot see in a laboratory, such as turbulences in the supersonic stream around turbine blades of a jet engine, or the mantle convection inside our own planet. User Support Computer centers usually have professional staff supporting users in programming, debugging or performance tuning. However, they usually do not know much about various research fields such as materials engineering or molecular science. To bridge the gap between Computational Science and Computer Science, the R. I. I. T. has computational scientists and computer scientists working together. The unique collaboration of these two types of experts is the key to their cutting edge to assist users in the fundamental part of studies. Pioneering the Computing Services for Academic Studies in Japan The Research Institute for Information Technology (R. I. I. T.) of Kyushu University consists of scientists and supporting employees, but it is not just a "pure" institute. Though it is related to various aspects of information technology, its mission also includes the following IT-related services and studies:  network services for the university;  other IT-related campus-wide services;  high-performance computing services;  advanced studies for the future of these services.

2. ?? Current Systems Lineup (Photo by Courtesy of Fujitsu, Ltd.) Scalar-Parallel Supercomputer (SMP): Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST580 (Photo by Courtesy of Fujitsu, Ltd.)  Peak Performance: 13.1 TFLOPS  #Nodes: 32  #Cores: 2,048  Memory: 4.0 TB  Node: Itanium2 1.6 GHz (dual core)×32, 128 GB Memory  Interconnect: InfiniBand 4xDDR (20Gbps) ×4 / node  Disk: 250 TB (data) ＋ 250TB (backup) (shared with PRIMEGY cluster)  #Users: 647 (as of Oct. 2009) PC Cluster: Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX200S3  Peak Performance: 18.4 TFLOPS  #Nodes: 192×2 sets  #Cores: 1,536  Memory: 3.0 TB  Node: Xeon 3.0 GHz (dual core)×2, 8 GB Memory  Interconnect: InfiniBand 4xDDR (20Gbps) ×1 / node  #Users: 187 (as of Oct. 2009) Scalar-Parallel Supercomputer (NUMA): Hitachi SR16000/L2  Peak Performance: 25.267 TFLOPS  #Nodes:42  #Cores: 1,344  Memory: 5.5 TB  Node: POWER6 4.7 GHz (dual core)×16 128 GB Memory×41 nodes ＋ 256GB Memory×1 node  Interconnect: InfiniBand 4xDDR (20Gbps) ×2 / node  Disk: 200TB with Tape Library: 112TB  #Users: 354 (as of Oct. 2009) Upgrade History and Future Plan (Fujitsu VPP5000) (IBM eServer p5) Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST + PRIMERGY (Hitachi SR11000) ? Hitachi SR16000 March 2005 May 2009 June 2007 Spring 2011 ? (Photo by Courtesy of Hitachi, Ltd.) Spring 2013 ?