RIKEN Institute of "Togaku" development "working to solve global problems" June 23, 14:53
In response to the fact that the supercomputer "Togaku" became the world's number one in four departments such as calculation speed in the latest world ranking, the developed RIKEN and others held a press conference, President Hiroshi Matsumoto said " I would like to work on solving global problems."
The world ranking of supercomputers is announced by an international conference by experts every six months. It ranked first in four out of four departments that competed in the speed of calculation.
In response, RIKEN and Fujitsu held a press conference in Kobe.
Among them, Hiroshi Matsumoto, the director of RIKEN, said, "Futaku is Mt. Fuji, and we have been aiming for extremely high performance and a wide range of capabilities in the base. "Although we have already achieved results in measures against the new coronavirus, we would like to bring out the full performance and work to solve global problems."
Japan, America, and China competing for technical skills
Supercomputers are becoming more important as one of the infrastructures of society, and the speed of computation has been competing with each other's technology.
From 1993, when the ranking started this time, to June 2010, for more than 17 years, supercomputers from Japan and the United States dominated the list.
Among them, the Japanese supercomputer called “Earth Simulator” used for predicting climate change has been the best in the world for more than two years from 2002 to 2004.
However, in November 2010, China's supercomputer became the world's first for the first time, and from this time on, China will continue to increase its presence.
Supercomputers from the United States and China have been number one since 2012, and since 2013 China has become the number one in the world for five consecutive years.
This is the first time in nine years since the "K computer" at RIKEN was the number one supercomputer in Japan.
"Futaku" Not only the calculation speed but also the ease of use
"Futaku" is a supercomputer developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu, and is installed at the RIKEN facility in Kobe.
It was developed as a successor to the "K computer" supercomputer.
At Togaku, there are 432 devices called racks with a height of about 2 meters connected by wiring, and most of the racks contain about 380 CPUs, which are the brains of computers, and central processing units.
The CPU of "Togake" is the latest model that has a processing speed of 24 times that of "K computer", and we used about 158,000 CPUs, which is almost twice as much as that of "K computer". Therefore, the calculation speed is about 40 times faster than the K computer, and about 3 times faster than the American supercomputer "Summit", which has been the world's highest for the second consecutive year.
However, "Fugaku" has been developed focusing not only on calculation speed but also on ease of use.
The speed of calculation is as if a sports car is competing on a short-distance straight road, and operability and stability are also important for winning various races.
From the development process, engineers who make the main body of "Togaku" proceeded with the development of the computer-powered programming engineers.
As a result,
it is ranked first in the category showing
▽ calculation methods that are often used for simulation, ▽ artificial intelligence learning performance,
▽ and big data processing performance.
Supercomputers are becoming increasingly important as one of the social infrastructures used for predicting disasters and climate change as well as developing new drugs and materials.
In the future, it will be noted how "Fugaku" can contribute to new technological developments and scientific discoveries by making good use of its calculation speed and ease of use, and achieving good results.