What is Ookami?

Ookami is a testbed  for  researchers nationwide to explore future supercomputing technologies and to advance computational and data-driven research on pressing science challenges.

Unique and novel features include:

• First access for US research and first planned install of A64fx outside of Japan
• First CPU worldwide with on-package high bandwidth memory (1 TB/s, 82% peak measured on STREAM triad is 8x Sky Lake socket)
• First CPU worldwide to implement the ARM scalable vector extensions with multiple features to facilitate auto-vectorization
• High CPU performance (2.76dpTFLOP/s, dgemm 94% peak) balanced to match memory speed giving ~0.4 bytes/dpFLOP is unparalleled in modern CPUs (4.6x Sky Lake, 3x NVIDIA V100)
• Green technology with high power efficiency.

What does this mean for science? Compared with the best CPUs anticipated for the deployment era, A64fx offers 2-4x better performance on memory-intensive applications such as sparse-matrix solvers found in many engineering and physics codes. For nearly all other applications performance is also better or competitive.