AsianScientist (Jun. 23, 2020) – The Fugaku supercomputer, which is being developed jointly by RIKEN and Fujitsu Limited based on Arm® technology, has taken the top spot on the TOP500 list, a ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers. The results were announced on June 22 at the ISC High Performance 2020 Digital, an international high-performance computing conference.
It also swept the other rankings of supercomputer performance, taking first place on the HPCG, a ranking of supercomputers running real-world applications, HPL-AI, which ranks supercomputers based on their performance capabilities for tasks typically used in artificial intelligence applications, and Graph 500, which ranks systems based on data-intensive loads. This is the first time in history that the same supercomputer has topped the TOP500, HPCG and Graph500 lists simultaneously.
On the Top500, it achieved a LINPACK score of 415.53 petaFLOPS, a much higher score than the 148.6 petaFLOPS of its nearest competitor, Summit in the United States. This marks the first time a Japanese system has taken the top ranking since June 2011, when the K computer—Fugaku’s predecessor—took first place. On HPCG, it scored 13,400 teraFLOPS using 138,240 nodes, and on HPL-AI it gained a score of 1.421 exaFLOPS—the first time a computer has even earned an exascale rating on any list.
The top ranking on Graph 500 was won by a collaboration involving RIKEN, Kyushu University, Fixstars Corporation and Fujitsu Limited. Using 92,160 nodes, it solved a breadth-first search of an enormous graph with 1.1 trillion nodes and 17.6 trillion edges in approximately 0.25 seconds, earning it a score of 70,980 gigaTEPS, more than doubling the K computer’s score of 31,303 gigaTEPS and surpassing China’s Sunway TaihuLight, which is currently second on the list, with 23,756 gigaTEPS.
Fugaku, which is currently installed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan, is being developed under a national plan to design Japan’s next generation flagship supercomputer and to carry out a wide range of applications that will address high-priority social and scientific issues under Japan’s Society 5.0 plan.
In addition, Fugaku is currently being used on an experimental basis for research on COVID-19, including on diagnostics, therapeutics, and simulations of the spread of the virus. The new supercomputer is scheduled to begin full operation in April 2021.
“Ten years after the initial concept was proposed, and six years after the official start of the project, Fugaku is now near completion,” said Professor Satoshi Matsuoka, director of RIKEN R-CCS. “In addition to its use as a supercomputer, I hope that the leading-edge IT developed for it will contribute to major advances on difficult social challenges such as COVID-19.”
“The supercomputer Fugaku illustrates a dramatic shift in the type of compute that has been traditionally used in these powerful machines, and it is proof of the innovation that can happen with flexible computing solutions driven by a strong ecosystem,” said Mr. Rene Haas, President, IPG, Arm. “For Arm, this achievement showcases the power efficiency, performance and scalability of our compute platform, which spans from smartphones to the world’s fastest supercomputer.”
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Source: RIKEN.
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