The New Worlds Fastest Supercomputer
After 9 years, Japan returns to the top of the world of supercomputers. The first place is now occupied by the Fugaku supercomputer with a power of 415.5 petaflops – almost three times as much power compared to the previous record-holder – Summit.
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The American supercomputer Summit from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory was just dethroned from the throne of the highly watched TOP500 supercomputer list. The new king is the newly built Japanese supercomputer Fugaku which is the result of cooperation between the Japanese research institute RIKEN and Fujitsu.
The supercomputer Summit is now in the second spot with its roughly 148.6 petaflops (148.6 quadrillions or if you prefer numbers 148,600,000,000,000,000 floating-point operations per second). But Fugaku is capable of 415.5 petaflops (415.5 quadrillions or again, if you prefer numbers 415,500,000,000,000,000 floating-point operations per second) – almost three times as much! And as its creators say – in some specialized types of calculations it can reach up to 1,000 petaflops or 1 exaflop! To give you a more real-world comparison – the upcoming Xbox which should be coming this year was a graphical chip with the power of 12 teraflops – roughly one-hundredth of a petaflop.
The Fugaku supercomputer is made from 158,976 tailor-made chips from Fujistu that each has 48 compute cores. That is a total of 7,630,848 cores. To get such an insane supercomputer is not easy. The Japanese needed more than 6 years and 1.2 billion dollars to built this one.
But the new king hasn't started its rule yet. Fugaku, which located in the RIKEN institute in Kobe will start fully computing in 2021. But its power is already being utilized. Currently, it solves against the coronavirus by doing very sophisticated analyses of how infectious droplets from human breath spread. This only shows that supercomputers have even more practical uses.
Fugaku is the first Japanese supercomputer in the since 2011 that got to the throne of TOP500. And interestingly, it is not based on the same architecture you have (most likely) in your personal computer. Instead, it uses the same architecture you have in your phone – ARM (Advanced RISC Machines). Chips based on this architecture are simpler than x86 chips and consume less energy. But it doesn't mean they are less powerful. If you want to learn more about this I suggest you watch this video that explains it nice and clear.
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