Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer is fully operational. It can reach speeds of 442 petaFLOPS, which earned it the top spot for two consecutive terms in the Top500 list. (Image Credit: Riken/Fujitsu)
After seven years of development, the world’s fastest supercomputer, Japan’s Fugaku, is fully operational. The supercomputer can now be used by researchers to study COVID-19, fight climate change, and discover new drugs. The project, which took place at the Japanese scientific research institute Riken, began in 2014 in collaboration with Fujitsu. The system was proposed to serve as Japan’s high-performance computing infrastructure in the future.
Delivery of all 432 racks was completed in May 2020. Since then, trials have been underway to develop and optimize the system for researchers to help fight off the coronavirus. Now, Fugaku is open for shared use. Japan’s Research Organization for Information Science and Technology (RIST) already chose 74 research projects, which are planned to be implemented starting in April. RIST is also encouraging researchers to submit new project proposals.
Fugaku has replaced the K supercomputer, which was decommissioned in 2019. It performs high-resolution, long-duration, and large-scale simulations. Furthermore, Fugaku boasts up to 100 times the application performance of the K supercomputer. Fugaku reached speeds of 442 petaFLOPS. This enabled it to earn the top spot for two consecutive terms in the Top500 list. In comparison, the Folding@Home network reached 1.22 exaFLOPS in March 2020 and 2.4 exaFLOPS on April 13, 2020 – a magnitude larger.
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By combining it with AI and data science, the simulations could produce high-level results to solve problems at a new scale. Some outcomes include high-speed and high-precision drug discovery simulations, detecting diseases early, natural disaster prediction and simulations, development of new materials for next-gen batteries or fuel cells, and insights into the universe.
There are already encouraging results from trials performed with the supercomputer. Japanese researchers used Fugaku to test how well drugs work against the coronavirus. They also performed detailed droplet analysis to find ways to lessen COVID-19 transmission.
In another project, Japan’s Tokyo Medical and Dental University and Fujitsu Laboratories unveiled that by using the supercomputer, they were able to carry out cancer gene analysis in less than a day. Understanding the relationship between cancer cells and cancer-related genes could introduce new caner therapies.
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