ARM-powered supercomputer has taken pole position in speed ranking
For the first time ever, an ARM-based supercomputer has taken the top position in the ranking of the world's fastest supercomputers. What’s surprising is that it’s not from the US or China.
It’s the Japanese who have taken the crown for the world’s supercomputer. The previous frontrunner IBM Summit is history. That’s remarkable, especially considering the fact that the Fujitsu Fugaku is the first supercomputer developed for this purpose in Japan. What’s even more remarkable: the computer runs on ARM processors, which makes it the world’s first ARM supercomputer to lead the speed ranking.
The Fugaku took the lead of the top 500 list because of its score of 415,5 petaflops measured with the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark. That’s almost three times the performance of the previous winner. This is made possible by an ARM-based 48-core Fujitsu microprocessor called A64FX. 152,064 of these microprocessors work away in the Fugaku, which has a total of 7,299,072 cores and 4,866,048 GB of memory. In other words, under the right conditions, a performance of up to 1 exaflop (1,000 petaflops) can be achieved.
The Fugaku is installed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan. Officially, it won’t be put into operation until next year. Having said that, it has already been used in recent months to support the coronavirus efforts being made in Japan.
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