Japan’s supercomputer Fugaku named world’s fastest

Tokyo, June 23 (efe-epa).- Japanese supercomputer Fugaku, which was unveiled for the first time earlier this month, ranked fastest in the twice-yearly speed ranking of TOP500.

A Japanese supercomputer has topped the list for the first time in nine years.

Fugaku hit 415.5 petaflops or quadrillion computations, ousting Summit supercomputer, now placed second speediest. The device is installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee and developed by IBM with 148.8 petaflops, according to the TOP500 project, reported by Japanese media on Tuesday.

Sierra supercomputer developed by Lawrence Livermore, California was named third fastest device at 94.6 petaflops, according to the classification by German and the American universities.

Fugaku, named after Mount Fuji, also topped the other three categories which measure performance in industrial computational methods, artificial intelligence application and big data analytics.

According to Riken research institute which developed the supercomputer along with Fujitsu at its Kobe facility, is the first to lead in four categories.

“We were able to stand out in all the key specifications for supercomputers, and demonstrate it is the world’s highest performing. We expect it will aid in solving difficult societal problems such as the fight against the novel coronavirus,” Japan’s news agency Kyodo news cited Satoshi Matsuoka, director of computational science center, Riken.

Fugaku is operating under test phase to seek potential medicine for treating COVID-19 and for analyzing treatment using these. It is expected to become fully operational in April 2021.

The aim of Fugaku is to become the first supercomputer in the world to hit one exaflop, equivalent to one quintillion floating-point operations per second, a unit used to measure the performance of a computer.

The K Supercomputer, which preceded Fugaku before being discontinued in 2019, was the first to exceed petaflops and led the TOP500 in June 2011, and maintained the position for a year. EFE-EPA

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