Tokyo (AFP)

The Japanese supercomputer Fugaku, developed by the public research institute Riken in partnership with the Japanese computer group Fujitsu, won the prize for the fastest supercomputer in the world, the institute announced on Monday in a press release.

Fugaku came out on top of the latest ranking unveiled by the specialized site Top500, dethroning the American supercomputer Summit, developed by IBM and installed in the national laboratory of nuclear physics in Oak Ridge (Tennessee).

Summit came first in the last four rankings of this reference site, which are published twice a year.

The speed of Fugaku (another name for Mount Fuji in Japanese) is about 2.8 times that of Summit, or 415.53 petaflops versus 148.6 petaflops.

A petaflop corresponds to one million billion operations per second.

Fugaku should not be commissioned at 100% until 2021, but it has already started to be used in research on the Covid-19, in particular by modeling the way in which the droplets from respiration can get disseminate in a crowded office or train when the windows are open.

It should also be called in the long term to contribute to the research of new drugs, new energy and industrial solutions, to the simulation of natural disasters or even to fundamental research on the universe, according to the Riken Institute.

In addition to the Top500, Fugaku has also taken the lead in the Graph500, HPCG and HPL-AI rankings: it is the first time that a supercomputer has simultaneously taken first place in these four rankings, according to the Riken Institute.

Supercomputers are an essential element of research in fields as varied as artificial intelligence or quantum computing, due to their formidable computing power.

They are the subject of fierce competition between the major world economic powers, especially between the United States and China, which alone have 70% of the supercomputers present at the Top500.

Also the first place of Fugaku, the first for a Japanese supercomputer since 2011, may not last. Three American supercomputers aiming at a computing power measured in exaflops, or several billion billions of operations per second, should be launched in the next years.

© 2020 AFP