Computers

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

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Fugaku is now the most powerful supercomputer in the world, according to the latest Top500 list
RIKEN
The Summit supercomputer has been dethroned as the most powerful in the world, by a newcomer from Japan called Fugaku
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Fugaku is now the most powerful supercomputer in the world, according to the latest Top500 list
RIKEN

The world’s most powerful supercomputer has just fired up. A newcomer named Fugaku has nabbed the number one spot in the Top500 list of supercomputers, surpassing Summit, the reigning champion of the past few years.

Fugaku is installed in the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan, and only just began some operations this month. The Top500 list primarily ranks systems based on a metric called High Performance Linpack (HPL), and Fugaku boasts a HPL of 415.5 petaflops. That makes it 2.8 times more powerful than runner-up Summit, on 148.8 petaflops.

And in single or further reduced precision, Fugaku’s peak performance tops 1,000 petaflops. That pushes it into the exaflop range, which looks to be where the next generation battles will be waged.

By an alternative metric called the High-Performance Conjugate Gradient (HPCG), Fugaku also comes out on top. It runs at 13.4 HPCG-petaflops, marking a huge leap over Summit on 2.93 HPCG-petaflops.

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

The Summit supercomputer has been dethroned as the most powerful in the world, by a newcomer from Japan called Fugaku
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It dethrones Summit, installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA, which was the top dog for 2018 and 2019. Sierra, also in the US, drops down to slot three with a HPL of 94.6 petaflops. China rounds out the top five, with Sunway TaihuLight at 93 petaflops, and Tianhe-2A at 61.4 petaflops.

But Fugaku probably won’t hold onto the crown for very long. Next year the exascale revolution begins in earnest, with Intel and the US Department of Energy launching Aurora, while Cray and AMD launch Frontier. Aurora will pack 1 exaflop of processing power, while Frontier leapfrogs it to 1.5 exaflops. Although Fugaku can technically reach 1 exaflop, it’s only during a particular type of operation – Aurora and Frontier will do it natively.

Fugaku is set to begin its full operations in 2021.

Source: Top500

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6 comments
moreover
I wonder how these top dogs manage heat and how power hungry they are. Back in 2014 NREL, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, teamed up with HP and Intel to create Peregrin, a warm-water, liquid-cooled supercomputer that was efficient and provided hot water to the Energy Systems Integration Facility, meeting all of the building's heating needs. (Peregrin has since been updated by Eagle).
Uber_Poppy
I was in the industry for years (Unisys) and thought we had powerful stuff back in the '80s , lol. - My question would be what is the cost per second of computational time, and what will be the architecture of the interface. This is really wild stuff. What boggles the mind is what kind of AI system can this baby cook over a period of lets say... one year!?!?!
Eldon Burr II
Why don't they network them and make a 3 exaflop supercomputer?
Kevin Ritchey
I bet it still can't run the latest WIN10 update as it sucks on any computer.
Fast Corner
Whenever I see the photos of these giant computing systems, I am always reminded of that movie Colossus: The Forbin Project from 1970. It's a goofy movie by modern standards, but in many ways, it is frighteningly prescient (Pro tip: Do not network your supercomputer to your enemy's supercomputer and let them play together. What? Oh, never mind, too late). Anyway, the "Colussus" computer was a giant thing much like these supercomputers. If you haven't seen the movie, catch it some time for a few laughs and a few chills. Congrats to Team Japan and looking forward to some exa-level fluid dynamics analysis and weather forecasting. And maybe some Mario Kart.
pSynrg
So in about 20 years we'll have this on a thumbnail sized piece of sillicon (or whatever exotic material will take its place)? Much like the Intel 4004 had more power than the room filling ENIAC...