Key milestone in the development of the post-K supercomputer

The post-K computer—a supercomputer system being jointly developed by the RIKEN Center for Computational Science and Fujitsu—has hit a major development milestone. Fujitsu has announced that they have created the prototype for the CPU that will power the new machine, and have begun testing the functionality of the chip. The new system is based on the widely used Arm® instruction set architecture, with an expanded instruction set intended for supercomputer applications. The post-K computer, which is expected to begin full operations around 2021, will be used for applications such as drug discovery, disaster prediction, climate predictions, energy-saving devices, and artificial intelligence. The developers intend the new machine to be a world leader in terms of energy consumption, computational capability, usability, and creating groundbreaking results. For more information, see the press release issued by Fujitsu.