China and the United States are engaged in a race to build the world's most powerful computers. Now they have both been surpassed by a supercomputer in Japan.
According to a biannual ranking released Monday, June 22, by the U.S.-European TOP500 project, the latest supercomputer built by Japan's state-backed Riken research institute has the fastest computing speed in the world. The ranking marks the first time a Japanese supercomputer has grabbed the top position in nine years.
Another IBM system, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, slid from second to third in the ranking, while systems in China moved from third and fourth to fourth.
The supercomputer, named after Mount Fuji by the name of Fugaku, also took the top spot in three other categories that evaluated output in industrial use computing techniques, artificial intelligence applications, and big data analysis.
Fugaku computed 2.8x more than IBM's supercomputer
A long-awaited supercomputer named Fugaku, built by the government-sponsored Riken Institute in the city of Kobe, took first place in a biannual speed ranking published Monday, June 22.
At Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the Japanese computer conducted 2.8 times more calculations a second than an IBM system. Fugaku bumped into the second position in the so-called Top500 list.
Japan Times reported Riken supercomputer had overtaken the rankings in the four groups for the first time. The report added Riken was able to stand out in all the key specifications for supercomputers and demonstrate it is the world's highest-performing.
"We expect it will aid in solving difficult social problems such as the fight against the novel coronavirus," said Satoshi Matsuoka, the institute's computational science center director.
Shinichi Kato, president of Fujitsu IT Products Ltd., expressed his satisfaction on the rankings, saying, "I [felt delighted] and honored to [be involved] in creating Fugaku." Fujitsu IT Products, a wholly-owned unit of Fujitsu, was in charge of the supercomputer's production.
Will Fugaku help fight COVID-19?
Fugaku is currently operating on a trial basis for research into new medicines to counter the novel coronavirus. It is scheduled to be fully operational in the business year starting in April 2021.
In May, the new supercomputer Riken-Fujitsu, was transported to the Institute's Computational Science Center in Kobe. The same location housed its predecessor, the K supercomputer, which was decommissioned last summer.
The K supercomputer, which was the first supercomputer in the world to produce more than ten quadrillion computations per second, ranked No. 1 in June 2011 and kept the top spot for a year.
The US has dominated the ranking since, along with China. Unlike the United States and China, the enormous expense of building supercomputers means Japan can only budget to make one every few years.
The Top500 list, compiled by American and German researchers, is being published to coincide with a supercomputer event held in Frankfurt, Germany. However, the event will be going virtual this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The K supercomputer became the subject of controversy in 2009, Japan Times reported. It challenged whether Japan continued to maintain its No. 1 role amid an economic crisis.
