World’s Fastest Computer, Fugaku, is Researching the Spread of Coronavirus

For the first time eleven years, Japan has the fastest supercomputer in the world and it has already been put to work to research the spread and treatment of the novel coronavirus.

Japan’s supercomputer, Fagaku, which was developed over six years by Fujitsu (FJTSF) and government research institute Riken, ranked first in the Top500 list of global supercomputers carrying out 2.8 times more calculations per second than an IBM machine in the US.

The US IBM machine, called Summit, claimed the top spot of the bi-annual Top500 list the previous four times and is housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

The Top500 grades the world’s most powerful non-distributed computer systems and measures benchmarks such as processing speed and the performance of computing used in artificial intelligence and deep learning.

Fugaku can also perform over 415 quadrillions (415,000 trillion) calculations a second than second-place Summits 148 quadrillion computations per second.

“I hope that the leading-edge IT developed for it will contribute to major advances on difficult social challenges such as Covid-19,” Satoshi Matsuoka, the head of Riken’s Center for Computational Science said in a statement.

Experts are already using the Japanese supercomputer on an experimental basis for research on Covid-19, including on diagnostics, therapeutics, and simulations of the spread of the virus, Riken said in a statement in April.

The room-sized machine lives in the city of Kobe and its name is another way of saying Mount Fuji. It is scheduled to be operating at full capacity next year.

Powered by chips from SoftBank-owned (SFTBY SOFTBANK) Arm, the Japanese supercomputer knocked Sierra, another US-built system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California into third place.

The fourth and fifth places were taken by two supercomputers developed by Chinese national research institutes, Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe-2A.

The supercomputer also beat other supercomputer performance rankings, becoming the first to top the Graph500, HPCG, and HPL-AI lists.