Japan’s Fugaku Keeps 2nd Spot on Fastest Supercomputer Ranking

The Yomiuri Shimbun

15:32 JST, May 23, 2023

The Fugaku supercomputer, developed by Japanese government-funded Riken and Fujitsu Ltd., ranked second in the Top500 world ranking of computing speed, the Japanese research institute said Monday.

The ranking is announced twice a year at an international conference of supercomputer researchers. Fugaku has maintained second place for three consecutive rankings since May 2022.

Fugaku had been No. 1 for four consecutive rankings since June 2020.

Overtaking Fugaku at the top has been the state-of-the-art Frontier system in the United States.

Frontier’s calculation speed was 1,194 petaflops per second, while Fugaku’s was 442 petaflops. The top 10 systems remained the same in the latest ranking.

Japan’s supercomputer did maintain its top position for the seventh consecutive ranking in the High-Performance Conjugate Gradient, a benchmark for processing speed for industrial applications, and in Graph500, a benchmark on big data analysis capabilities.

“The ranking revealed the high level of our overall competence,” said Satoshi Matsuoka, director of the Riken Center for Computational Science.

The Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry is currently studying the specific performance and functions of Fugaku’s successor system.

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