Japan's new supercomputer, known as Fugaku, is now the fastest in the world. The ARM- based Fugaku has managed to overtake America's Summit , which has held the top spot on the Top500 for the past two years .
Fugaku is the first ARM-based supercomputer to become the world's fastest supercomputer. It has a High Performance Linpack (HPL) score of 415.5 petaflops, which is 2.8 times higher than Summit's score.
It features a 48-core A64FX SoC and its peak performance can reach 1,000 petaflops. Such performance may correspond to the exaflop range, which is the new "battlefield" of next-generation supercomputers.
The top 5 supercomputers on the list are:
But in addition to speed, Fugaku also managed to win the top spots in other rankings that test computers on different workloads, such as Graph 500, HPL-AI, and HPCG. To date, no other supercomputer has ever won the top spot in all four rankings simultaneously.
In recent years, the top spots for the fastest supercomputer have belonged to either America or China. It is the first time in nine years that a Japanese system has taken the top spot on the Top500.
In total, 226 supercomputers on the list come from China, 114 from America and 30 from Japan.
Of course, it's very possible that Fugaku won't stay at the top for much longer. The new exascale is expected to begin next year with the launch of Aurora (with 1 ExaFlop of processing power) from Intel and the US Department of Energy .
But both Cray and AMDhave planned to release another 1.5 ExaFlops system, called Frontier, within the next year.
Nevertheless, Fugaku is expected to be fully operational by April 2021, and has already begun assisting medical research related to the coronavirus pandemic.
