Fugaku tops 2 supercomputer rankings

Jiji Press

17:17 JST, May 30, 2022

TOKYO (Jiji Press) — Riken, a government-funded research institute, said Monday that its Fugaku was ranked the world’s fastest supercomputer in two global rankings for the fifth consecutive time since June 2020.

Meanwhile, Fugaku, jointly developed with Fujitsu Ltd., fell to second place behind the U.S. supercomputer Frontier in two other rankings.

The rankings were announced at an international conference on high-performance computing technology in Germany the same day.

Fugaku lost to Frontier in the TOP500 ranking, which has been used as an index to evaluate the computing power of supercomputers since 1993.

Still, Fugaku maintained its lead position in the High Performance Conjugate Gradients benchmark, which measures calculation power more closely linked to the commercial use of supercomputers.

“Despite two years having passed since its appearance in a field with rapid evolution and fierce competition, [Fugaku] remains a leading supercomputer with both world-class performance and wide versatility,” said Satoshi Matsuoka, director at the Riken Center for Computational Science.

Fugaku, the successor to Riken’s K supercomputer, which ended operations in 2019, notched a computing speed of 442 petaflops, or quadrillions of floating-point operations per second, according to the TOP500 ranking, while Frontier achieved 1,102 petaflops.

Installed at the center in Kobe, Fugaku started full-fledged operations in March last year. It has carried out studies on new COVID-19 treatments, simulations of airborne droplets and forecasts of sudden rainstorms.