World’s Winning Supercomputer Announced

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Japan has taken the lead in the supercomputer race, having built a supercomputer that carries out 2.8 times more calculations per second than the previous title holder. This rapid supercomputer is already being deployed in the global fight against the coronavirus.

A supercomputer is classified by being more than 1,000 times faster than a regular computer. Governments use supercomputers to simulate nuclear blasts, to perform virtual weapons testing and other computationally complex tasks. These computers are also used for modelling climate systems and for biotechnology research and medicine.  

The Fugaku supercomputer was developed by Japanese research institute RIKEN and Fujitsu – its processor technology comes from UK-based ARM. 

The US IBM machine, called Summit, came top of the bi-annual Top500 list the previous four times.

Fugaku has already been put to work on fighting the coronavirus, simulating how droplets would spread in office spaces with partitions installed or in packed trains with the windows open. When it is fully operational next year, experts are hoping the machine will also be able to help narrow down the search for effective treatments for the virus.

Its performance was measured at 415.53 petaflops, 2.8 times faster than second-place Summit’s 148.6 petaflops, according to bbc.com.

As a comparison to show the scale of these incredibly powerful machines, the new Playstation 5 operates at 10.28 teraflops – there are 1,000 teraflops in a petaflop. 

Chips designed by Intel and IBM have dominated the TOP500 list of most powerful supercomputers – this is the first time an ARM-based chip has hit the top spot, as reported by dailymail.co.uk.

It took six years to develop the room-sized Fugaku supercomputer (named after Mount Fuji) located in the city of Kobe.

Third place in the list went to another IBM system, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, while the fourth and fifth places were taken by computers in China.