According to a Top500 list, that ranks the most powerful benchmarked supercomputer in the world, the Japanese Fugaku is currently the fastest computer in the world. Here are some details you should know about the computer world’s top shot, Fugaku.
The Top500 announcement that comes out in June every year just revealed that the Fugaku gave out a performance of 415.5 petaflops. Petaflops is a unit of computing speed used to check a computer’s performance. The Guardian says that this means this supercomputer can perform more than 415 quadrillion computations a second.
Or, to get a better understanding, the Indiana University blog explains that for you to match just one petaflop, you have to perform one calculation per second for 31,688,765 years. Yes, that is one petaflop, now imagine how long it will take to perform 415.5 petaflops.
Also, note that the common HP Notebook 15 has a speed of about 3.30 GHz (which is nearly one teraflop). Since one petaflop is 1,000 teraflops, it means the Fugaku, the fastest computer in 2020, can do the work of 415,500 HP Notebook 15s.
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The Japanese Fugaku is the new king of supercomputers after it beat the previous number one, Summit, by performing 2.8 times faster than it. Interestingly, the Fujitsu’s 48-core A64FX SoC, which are ARM processors, powers this supercomputer. Making it the first number one system that uses ARM processors. IBM built Summit which was now number two according to Top500 rankings.
Fujitsu had begun building Fugaku in 2014 as a successor of its supercomputer, the K computer. The creators say that it will start operating by 2021 and they plan to install it at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan. According to the original estimate, Fugaku falls short of expectation.
Fujitsu had wanted it to reach about 1,000 petaflops and its 415.5 petaflops rating would be disappointing to them. Yet, it was enough for them to clinch top spot in 2020’s supercomputer rankings. Fugaku will use an operating system that runs both Linux and a McKernel light-weight Kernel simultaneously.
While we could not find a statement from Fujitsu on what the Fugaku would be used specifically for, we can guess that like all supercomputers, it may be used for a variety of purposes. These include; quantum mechanics, weather forecasting, climate research, oil and gas exploration, molecular modeling, and physical simulations.
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