RIKEN Supercomputer HOKUSAI

RIKEN Supercomputer HOKUSAI
Name	HOKUSAI
Organisation	RIKEN
Country	Japan
Location	Wako, Saitama
Dates	2010s–2020s
Architecture	Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER / SPARC64 / K computer lineage
Purpose	Scientific computing, climate modeling, materials simulation

RIKEN Supercomputer HOKUSAI

Overview

HOKUSAI was a high-performance computing system operated by RIKEN at the Wako campus in Saitama Prefecture, Japan, designed to support national initiatives in science and technology, climate science, materials science, bioinformatics, and computational chemistry. Deployed in the 2010s, HOKUSAI followed in the lineage of national assets such as Earth Simulator, K computer, and systems hosted by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the National Institute for Environmental Studies, and interfaced with projects funded by the MEXT and the Japan Science and Technology Agency.

Architecture and Hardware

HOKUSAI combined large-scale vector and scalar nodes based on designs from Fujitsu and processor families related to SPARC64 and successor architectures, reflecting trends established by Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER servers, NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA, and the Cray XC lineage. Its network topology used high-bandwidth interconnects similar to technologies from InfiniBand vendors and designs inspired by the interconnects of the K computer and Blue Gene series from IBM. Storage subsystems integrated parallel file systems comparable to Lustre and tape archives influenced by systems at the National Institute of Informatics (Japan), with cooling and power infrastructure modeled on deployments at Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

Performance and Benchmarks

Peak theoretical performance for HOKUSAI was reported using metrics comparable to LINPACK benchmarks and leadership-class rankings such as the TOP500 and efficiency measures inspired by the Green500. Performance claims were contextualized against contemporaries including K computer, Fugaku, Summit, Sierra, Tianhe-2, and Sequoia, and evaluated for workloads relevant to climate modeling and molecular dynamics used by groups at University of Tokyo, Kyoto University, and international collaborators like Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Max Planck Society institutes.

Software and Applications

HOKUSAI hosted software stacks drawn from ecosystem components including MPI implementations used in Argonne National Laboratory research, compilers akin to GNU Compiler Collection and vendor toolchains from Fujitsu, and libraries paralleling BLAS, LAPACK, and domain packages used by researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Application domains included large-scale simulations using codes influenced by Weather Research and Forecasting Model, Community Earth System Model, LAMMPS, GROMACS, VASP, and quantum chemistry packages used by groups at RIKEN Center for Computational Science and partners in the European Grid Infrastructure.

Operational History and Upgrades

Commissioning and operational milestones for HOKUSAI occurred alongside national programs overseen by MEXT and institutional planning at RIKEN, with maintenance and upgrade cycles informed by experiences from Fujitsu deployments and lessons from earlier installations like Earth Simulator and K computer. Hardware refreshes and software stack updates were scheduled to align with initiatives by Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, interoperability tests with systems at KEK (High Energy Accelerator Research Organization), and collaborations with industry partners such as Toshiba and Hitachi. Decommissioning planning and data migration practices reflected standards developed by National Institute of Informatics (Japan) and international consortia including PRACE.

Notable Research Projects and Collaborations

HOKUSAI supported projects in climate prediction with teams from University of Tokyo and the Meteorological Research Institute (Japan), materials discovery collaborations involving Imperial College London and Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, and biomedical simulations in cooperation with Osaka University and pharmaceutical partners linked to Takeda Pharmaceutical Company. It enabled cross-institutional work with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and European partners in the Horizon 2020 framework, contributing compute cycles to multinational studies in high-resolution climate ensemble runs, large-scale genomic analyses paralleling work at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and ab initio materials screening complementary to efforts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University.

Legacy and Impact on Japanese Supercomputing

HOKUSAI influenced successor projects including the procurement strategies that led to systems like Fugaku and shaped national policy discussions in MEXT and at RIKEN about domestic computing sovereignty, industrial partnerships with Fujitsu and Toshiba, and workforce development coordinated with universities such as Kyoto University and Tohoku University. Its operational lessons informed best practices adopted by centers like the RIKEN Center for Computational Science and contributed to Japan’s positioning in global initiatives represented by TOP500 and collaborations with PRACE and NERSC.

Category:Supercomputers