Fugaku: the most powerful supercomputer in the world is ARM

Just in the hours when Apple announces the transition from Intel hardware to ARM-based processors for Mac line computers, the architecture of the British holding receives another important recognition: it is the one that comes from the Far East where the supercomputer Fugaku ranks at the top of the ranking of the world's most powerful computers.

The R-CCS Fugaky supercomputer

Equipped with the Japanese RIKEN Center for Computational Science, it has a beating heart based on the 48-core A64FX system-on-a-chip manufactured by Fujitsu. An extremely complex computer with 158,976 chips organized to work together and release 415.5 petaFLOP reaching peaks of 1 exaFLOP when necessary. Far exceeded the Summit of the Oak Ridge National Lab (Tennessee) at 148.8 petaFLOP.



The realization required an economic investment quantified in over a billion dollars and approximately six years of planning. There is no GPU present. Fugaku is already operational, managing artificial intelligence algorithms also for COVID-19 research, a goal that in recent months has seen several brains employed all over the world, also through a shared approach.

The primacy could however, in turn, it will be broken in the not too distant future: Cray Computing and AMD are already working to develop a 1.5 exaFLOP machine for the Department of Energy of the aforementioned Oak Ridge National Lab. The same reality has a partnership with Intel has already been formalized for a similar system commissioned by the Argonne National Laboratory (Illinois). Both will make their debut within the next year.

Source: TOP500