Fugaku Ranked 6th For Speed Among World Supercomputers; U.S. Systems Sweep Top 4 in Twice-Yearly Assessment

The Yomiuri Shimbun

17:06 JST, November 19, 2024

The Fugaku supercomputer placed sixth in the Top500 world rankings for computing speed, the Riken research organization announced on Monday.

Although Fugaku was overtaken by newer machines from the United States and other countries, dropping two places from the previous rankings in May of this year, it has remained in the top 10 for 10 consecutive terms.

Fugaku was jointly developed by the Japanese government-funded Riken and Fujitsu Ltd.

The rankings are announced twice a year at an international conference of supercomputer researchers. The top-ranked machine this time around was the El Capitan system developed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States, with a calculation speed of 1.742 exaflops per second.

U.S. systems dominated the top four places. Fugaku, with a calculation speed of 442 petaflops per second, was also overtaken by the newest system from Italy.

Fugaku ranked No. 1 four consecutive times from June 2020 to November 2021. More than four years after its first appearance, Fugaku was still among the fastest computers in the latest rankings, and it has been named the fastest system on the High-Performance Conjugate Gradient, a benchmark for processing speed for industrial applications, 10 consecutive times.

Riken and the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry have indicated that they intend to develop Fugaku’s successor, aiming to start operations around 2030 at the latest.