interesting, to say the least, choice for Fujitsu, i mean they do have SPARC/RISC experience and given that the current top dog in the world is Alpha/RISC based https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunway_TaihuLight , it seem strange to make such a huge bet on completely new architecture - Top500 has no ARM systems at least at the top of the list.

Beside big picture, there are such pesky details as "Fortran for ARM" HPC compiler. All these bearded and not so guys who walked Sun hallways for years ... The Intel HPC compilers also well established. What is available for ARM in that department?

I think you're missing the big picture here. Looks like Cray has been looking at ARM for awhile for Fast Forward 2 (US DoE I think, announced 2014: http://investors.cray.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98390&p=irol-newsA...). Looks like Barcelona Supercomputing Center also deployed ARM based test systems quite awhile ago (http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/barcelona-supercomputing-c..., http://gizmodo.com/5898633/can-an-arm-based-supercomputer-be...).

For what it's worth, there's current ARM propaganda [huge PDF!] at http://emit.tech/EMiT2016/Adeniyi-Jones-EMiT2016-Barcelona.p... (and incidentally something related to a more interesting sort of ARM-based system from the same meeting: http://emit.tech/EMiT2016/Navaridas-EMiT2016-Barcelona.pdf). That may not be terribly relevant to Fujitsu, though.

In what way is the Sunway Alpha-based? Dongarra says the ISA isn't.

This hardly looks "completely new" compared with Sunway, for instance, especially given work with it in Europe.

Fujitsu have their own compiler -- amongst their own essentially everything for K -- but GCC is "well-established" in HPC and you can see the Fortran-based HPC-type software in Fedora and Debian aarch64. (Yes, there's a lot more to it than that.)

Such pesky details haven't been forgotten: http://www.nag.co.uk/content/nag-broaden-64-bit-armv8-ecosys... https://www.nag.co.uk/content/nag-core-arm-performance-libra...

I'd be surprised if that's relevant to Fujitsu, though.

I wonder how much better the library is than the free alternatives.

The perspective you're missing is the x86 didn't replace SPARC in this case?