TOKYO: Riken said Tuesday that "Fugaku," being developed jointly by the Japanese government-linked research institute and other entities including Fujitsu Ltd., has been declared overwhelmingly the most powerful supercomputer in the TOP500 and three other global ranking categories.

It is the first time for a Japanese supercomputer to rank first on the TOP500 list since Riken's K computer claimed the No. 1 spot in June 2011 and November the same year.

Fugaku, installed at the Riken Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in the western Japan city of Kobe, achieved around 416 petaflops, or quadrillions of floating-point operations per second, some 2.8 times more than roughly 149 petaflops for the second-ranking Summit supercomputer in the United States.

The calculations were conducted by approximately 95.6 pct of Fugaku's some 159,000 central processing units mounted on 432 computer racks. The machine is expected to achieve even faster computing speeds through future software improvement, according to the Japanese team.

The Japanese supercomputer also ranked top in the High Performance Conjugate Gradients benchmark, which measures calculation speed for computer programs such as those for commercial use, the HPL-AI benchmark, measuring computing performance for artificial intelligence, and the Graph500 rating of a computer's ability to analyze graphs, important for big data processing.

The Japanese institutes began the development of Fugaku in 2014 as the successor to the K supercomputer. The new supercomputer will seek to achieve a computing power exceeding 100 times that of its predecessor, as well as increased energy efficiency. The machine is expected to become fully active in fiscal 2021.

Fugaku is expected to be used in a variety of fields, such as the development of drugs and gene therapies, and the prediction of natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis and typhoons.

The use of Fugaku in research on the novel coronavirus has already begun.

"Fugaku was developed to achieve high performance for application to areas of great interest to citizens, and it proved by far the most powerful supercomputer in the world as a result," R-CCS head Satoshi Matsuoka said.

"I believe that Fugaku's leading information technologies will spread around the world and help solve many difficult issues for society, such as the novel coronavirus epidemic," he added.

JIJI Press