Japan’s Fugaku ranks fastest in TOP500 supercomputers

High-performance computer Fugaku is 2.8 times more powerful than US-based supercomputer Summit

ISTANBUL: Japan's high-performance computer Fugaku was named the fastest supercomputer in the world, a computer statistic website, TOP500, announced late Monday.

Fugaku is 2.8 times more powerful than the US-based supercomputer Summit, which came first in the previous list of TOP500 revealed in November.

Fugaku, which was launched in 2014 and is scheduled to fully operate in 2021, is able to do over 415 quadrillion computations per second 415.5 petaflops according to the TOP500's press release.

A petaflop is an ability to perform one quadrillion computations per second.

"Fugaku, is powered by Fujitsu’s 48-core A64FX SoC, becoming the first number one system on the list to be powered by ARM processors," the press release said.

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"In single or further reduced precision, which is often used in machine learning and AI applications, Fugaku’s peak performance is over 1,000 petaflops (1 exaflops)."

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The second fastest computer was Summit with 148.8 petaflops.

"The system has 4,356 nodes, each equipped with two 22-core Power9 CPUs, and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs," it noted.

Sierra in the US (94.6 petaflops) was the third-fastest computer, while China’s Sunway TaihuLight (93 petaflops) and Tianhe-2A (61.4 petaflops) computers followed it.

"China continues to dominate the TOP500 with regard to system count, claiming 226 supercomputers on the list," the statement said.

The list included 114 systems from the US, 30 from Japan, 18 from France, and 16 from Germany.

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It added: "Despite coming in second on system count, the US continues to edge out China in aggregate list performance with 644 petaflops to China’s 565 petaflops.

"Japan, with its significantly smaller system count, delivers 530 petaflops."

Fugaku focuses on Covid-19

Japan's RIKEN Center for Computational Science, which installed Fugaku, said in another press release: "Fugaku is currently being used on an experimental basis for research on Covid-19, including on diagnostics, therapeutics, and simulations of the spread of the virus."

Satoshi Matsuoka, the director of RIKEN, said: "I hope that the leading-edge IT developed for it will contribute to major advances on difficult social challenges such as Covid-19."

He added that the computer was designed to reach high performance on a variety of applications of great public interest.