Fugaku, the world’s fastest computer

Fugaku 富岳. © RIKEN Center for Computational Science.

Fugaku, the supercomputer jointly developed by the RIKEN research institute and Fujitsu Ltd based on ARM technology, was crowned fastest computer ever by Top500, a listing of the world’s fastest supercomputers. It earned the top spot with a LINPACK score of 415.5 petaflops, a much higher result than the previous record-holder, the 148.6-petaflop Summit in the U.S. Like many of its brethren in the extended supercomputer family, it will be used for computation-intensive applications, like drug development, natural disaster simulations, weather and climate forecasting, new materials development, etc. While most supercomputers are developed on x86 processor architecture, the Fugako is based on an ARM processor, Fujitsu’s 48-core, A64FX SoC. Fugaku also supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.x, the de facto standard operating system in the field.

⇨ TOP500.org, “Japan captures TOP500 crown with arm-powered supercomputer.”

⇨ IEEE Spectrum, John Boyd, “Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer completes first-ever sweep of high-performance benchmarks.”