This year we have seen how everything has gone up in Spain, the price of gasoline, food, electricity, etc. But, this situation does not only occur in our country, it is something that is occurring in a general way. Due to the price of electricity, Japan has had to partially shut down one of its supercomputers.
For those who do not know, there is the TOP 500 classification, where the most powerful supercomputers in the world are registered. Currently, the list is heavily dominated by systems developed in China and the United States. But on the list are systems from many others, including those installed in Japan.
Having to turn off a supercomputer because of the electricity bill
Specifically, we talk about fugaku Supercomputer, which is Japan’s own development. This system currently occupies the second position, with a maximum power of 537 PFLOPs and in a sustained way it offers 442 PFLOPs.
This system is based on 48-core AMR A64FX processors. The floating point power of these processors is based on an extension of SVE instructions. It makes use of a 512-bit floating point system. Each of the nodes is based on a 48-core main processor and 4 auxiliary cores.
This is installed system at the Japan Institute of Physics and Chemistry. The institution faces a big problem, which is not computational, but rather the electricity bill. And this system has a consumption of 30 MWwhich is enough.
Due to the increase in electricity costs, the operators of this system have had to take measures. Due to this situation, they have made the decision to temporarily shut down 30% of nodes. They have had to make this adjustment, which means a great reduction in power, because otherwise it would be entering a great financial crisis.
To give us an idea of the problem, they have given data regarding the cost of operating the system. This supercomputer, in 2021, had an operating cost of 40 million dollars in electricity. the electricity bill this year it has risen to 300 million dollars, something that is totally unassumable.
New notice about what awaits us
The world economic situation is bad and there is no single reason. Although Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is taking its toll on us, it is not the only reason for a bad situation. Since the pandemic, the transport of goods has become brutally expensive. There is also a big fuel supply problem worldwide, which makes everything more expensive.
We may well think that we care about what is happening in Japan. It matters in its fair measure, it is a sample of a problem that is not local, but global. We still have a parochial mentality, which is very medieval, but today we live in a totally global society.
Something that happens, not only in Ukraine which is here “next door”, in Japan or in Taiwan affects us. We just have to see how a virus that broke out in China ended up locking us all up at home. Everything is connected and related and, to a greater or lesser extent, we no longer live in more or less isolated societies.
