The ARM-Based Supercomputer that japan launched recently is setting new records and breaking old ones. The entire world is on a speed hunt and various companies are investing millions of dollars in it.
Over the years, the processing power of our devices has increased several folds and it is only going to get better from now.
The only limitation that we humans have over the field of research is how fast can we process information.
With the amount of digital data rising every day, we need faster computers which can yield faster and more accurate results. The “Fugaku” supercomputer of Japan gave a great start to our journey towards speed.
Japan Claims Back The Title
The bi-annual TOP500 list of supercomputers ranks them based on their speed on performance. China and the US put up a tough fight each time and usually end up securing the top 2 spots.
But these changes today. Japan has finally made huge progress in its research and it is here to stay. Japan previously held the top rank back in 2011 and almost vanished.
Finally, at the 55th edition of the TOP500 Japan claimed back its title for owning the fastest supercomputer. This is also the very first time that an ARM-Based Supercomputer slew all its competition.
Stages Of Development
Fujitsu and the Riken Institute together have put in several years of extensive research into this.
The Fugaku is right now installed at Kobe and it took almost 6 years for the team to breathe life into it. The plan to develop such a device started back in 2014.
Back then, ARM chips are not exactly what comes to your mind when you think Speed. But right now, there is a wide range of devices running on ARM.
Fugaku has over 150,000 CPUs in its network allowing it to crank out such massive performance.
Tech Aspects Of The Computer
The A64FX processor forms the base of Fugaku and each of these has 48 CPU cores of version 8.2A ARM architecture.
This makes A64FX the first of its kind. Fugaku has 396 racks of these with each of them having 384 processing nodes.
These CPU cores have a clock speed of 2.2 GHz and has a massive RAM storage of 32GB in each chip. This ARM-Based Supercomputer has about 158,976 of these chips.
It adds up to a total of a whopping 7 million CPU cores. Fugaku landed a LINPACK benchmark score of 415.53 petaflops which is several folds higher than its competitor IBM’s summit.
Summit had a score of just 148.6 petaflops proving that the Japanese came up with something that’s almost three times faster. The lack of GPU in Fugaku might turn out to be a downside later.
Fugaku secured top spots in AI application processing (HPL-AI), Graph500, and also the conjugate gradients score (HPCG). This is the first-ever supercomputer to hold top positions at all four categories.
Conclusion
The Chinese continue to crowd the TOP500 list with over 226 supercomputers followed by the US that has around 114 computers.
There are just 30 supercomputers on the list that belong to the Japanese yet the Fugaku remains unbeatable. Japan hasn’t officially started pushing Fugaku to its full potential which we hope would begin by 2021.
It is currently helping us perform research on the COVID-19 pandemic. The full capability of the system would only come to light when it gets tested to its limits.
