Japan’s Fugaku surpasses Summit as the most powerful supercomputer in the world

Japan's Fugaku surpasses Summit as the most powerful supercomputer in the world

Fugaku is installed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan. And it just powered up , becoming the most powerful supercomputer in the world.

Fugaku has taken the number one spot on the Top500 supercomputer list , beating Summit , the reigning champion in recent years.

Top500

Fugaku is running 158,976 individual CPUs , based on Fujitsu’s 48-core A64FX system-on-chip. This makes it the first number one supercomputer to run on processors with the ARM architecture.

Top500 Supercomputers 1972841

The Top500 list primarily ranks systems based on a metric called High Performance Linpack (HPL), and Fugaku boasts an HPL of 415.5 petaflops. That makes it 2.8 times more powerful than Summit , at 148.8 petaflops. Fugaku’s peak performance exceeds 1,000 petaflops. That pushes it into the exaflop range.

Using an alternative metric called High Performance Conjugate Gradient (HPCG), Fugaku also stands out. It runs at 13.4 HPCG-petaflops, marking a big jump over Summit at 2.93 HPCG-petaflops. Fugaku will begin full operations in 2021.

All in all, Fugaku probably won’t hold onto the crown for long. Next year , with Intel and the US Department of Energy launching Aurora, it could soon be left behind. Although Fugaku can technically hit 1 exaflop, it is only during one particular type of operation – Aurora will do it natively.

The first version of what became today’s TOP500 list began as an exercise for a small conference in Germany in June 1993. Out of curiosity, the authors decided to revisit the list in November 1993 to see how the numbers had changed. stuff. At the time, they decided to continue compiling the list, which is now a highly anticipated, and highly debated, biannual event. The TOP500 list is compiled by Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; and Martin Meuer from ISC Group, Germany.