Japan's Fugaku Retains Title As World's Fastest Supercomputer

According to a report from Nikkei Asia (paywalled), "The Japanese-made Fugaku captured its fourth consecutive title as the world's fastest supercomputer on Tuesday, although a rival from the U.S. or China is poised to steal the crown as soon as next year." From a report: But while Fugaku is the world's most powerful public supercomputer, at 442 petaflops, China is believed to secretly operate two exascale (1,000 petaflops) supercomputers, which were launched earlier this year. The top 10 list did not change much since the last report six months ago, with only one new addition -- a Microsoft Azure system called Voyager-EUS2. Voyager, featuring AMD Epyc CPUs and Nvidia A100 GPUs, achieved 30.05 petaflops, making it the tenth most powerful supercomputer in the world.

The other systems remained in the same position - after Japan's Arm-based Fugaku comes the US Summit system, an IBM Power and Nvidia GPU supercomputer capable of 148 petaflops. The similarly-architected 94 petaflops US Sierra system is next. Then comes what is officially China's most powerful supercomputer, the 93 petaflops Sunway TaihuLight, which features Sunway chips. The Biden administration sanctioned the company earlier this year. You can read a summary of the systems in the Top10 here.

sigh

[phantomfive]

I wish I had any problem in my life worth using that much CPU power to solve.

Hmmmm. Excuse me, I'm going to go make some problems.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

They used Fugaku to model the spread of coronavirus particles in various scenarios early in the pandemic.

They found that those plastic barriers do very little to protect anyone, and in fact might make things worse by reducing airflow in a room. The best way to secure buildings is to create airflow through the room.

Re:

[phantomfive]

I read that study, I didn't find it very convincing. (Or rather, the conclusion that headlines drew from it "plastic barriers don't protect people" wasn't justified from the study. The study itself was useful for what it was)

What are the use of Super Computer ?

[ELCouz]

I mean beside bragging about X petaflops? Are they selling the compute time to universities for studies or it's internal use for secret gov division?

Re:What are the use of Super Computer ?

[ceoyoyo]

It's not hard to find out. Fugaku is at Riken, a public research institute. Summit and Sierra are at US government national labs, Summit is for civilian research, Sierra is for military nuke simulation.

Re:What are the use of Super Computer ?

[keithdowsett]

Finite element analysis of hetrogeneous structures
Weather forecasting
Protein folding
Modelling supernovae

If a problem can be decomposed into a series of non-interacting programs, like bitcoin mining, then it can be distributed across mulitple small computers. But when there is interaction between various parts of the model you really need the CPUs and high memory bandwidth of a supercomputer

Re:

[loftyhauser]

Nuclear blast-wave simulations and other gasdynamics and fluid dynamics... Even simulating all of the turbulent fluctuations on an aircraft in high-lift configuration is beyond the computational power we currently have. Then add all of the complexities of modeling the gas flow through the gas turbine engine.

Re:

[keithdowsett]

Maybe it could resolve the fashion paradox... why does less cost more??

Fugaku FLOPs

[JBMcB]

Are they going to updated the way they rank speed any time soon? Now it's not just FLOPs that matter, but matrix multiplication rates for accelerating the training of neural networks.

Of course it did

[OneHundredAndTen]

After all, it is fugaking fast.