Supercomputer Fugaku, jointly developed by Riken and Fujitsu, has been ranked number one in the 58th TOP500 list of the world’s supercomputers with LINPACK performance of 415.53 PFLOPS (petaflops) and a computing efficiency ratio of 80,87%.
Fugaku also took first place in the international ranking HPCG (High Performance Conjugate Gradient) achieving the high score of 13 400 TFLOPS (teraflops), while claiming first in the HPL-AI ranking with 1.421 EFLOPS.
The record achievement indicates the overall high performance of Fugaku and its significant contribution to make Society 5.0 a reality, leading Japan’s growth and producing world-leading results by solving social and scientific issues in the 2020s.
The rankings were announced on June 22 at the ongoing virtual event ISC (International Supercomputing Conference) High Performance 2020 Digital.
The Fugaku system used for the LINPACK test consists of 396 racks (152 064 nodes, approximately 95,6% of the entire system). It is the first time for a Japanese supercomputer to take the first place in TOP500 since the K computer claimed number one in November 2011 . Fugaku’s performance is approximately 2,8-times that of the supercomputer ranked second in the TOP500 list with148.6 PFLOPS.
For the HPCG benchmark, 360 racks (138 240 nodes, approximately 87% of the entire system) of Fugaku were used to achieve the high score of 13 400 TFLOPS (teraflops). This proves that the supercomputer can efficiently handle such real-world applications in the field of industry and perform well. Moreover, Fugaku exceeds the performance of the number two supercomputer (2 925.75 TFLOPS) by approximately 4,6-times.
Unlike the conventional listings of TOP500 and HPCG which measure the performance of double-precision arithmetic logic unit, HPL-AI is a new benchmark established in November 2019 as an index for evaluating calculation performance that takes into account the capabilities of single-precision and half-precision arithmetic logic units used in artificial intelligence. For this measurement, a high score of 1,421 EFLOPS (Exa FLOPS) was recorded using 330 racks (126 720 nodes, approximately 79,7% of the entire system) of Fugaku.
This is also a historical record, as Fugaku achieved 1 exa (10 raised to the power of 18) in one of HPL benchmarks for the first time in the world.
Satoshi Matsuoka, director of the Riken-Centre for Computational Science (R-CCS), comments: “Ten years after the initial concept was proposed, and six years after the official start of the project, Fugaku is now near completion.
“Fugaku was developed based on the idea of achieving high performance on a variety of applications of great public interest, such as the achievement of Society 5.0, and we are very happy that it has shown itself to be outstanding on all the major supercomputer benchmarks.
“In addition to its use as a supercomputer, I hope that the leading-edge IT technology developed for it will contribute to major advances on difficult social challenges such as Covid-19.”
Naoki Shinjo, corporate executive officer of Fujitsu, says: “I believe that our decision to use a co-design process for Fugaku, which involved working with Riken and other parties to create the system, was a key to our winning the top position on a number of rankings.
“I am particularly proud that we were able to do this just one month after the delivery of the system was finished, even during the Covid-19 crisis. I would like to express our sincere gratitude to Riken and all the other parties for their generous cooperation and support.
“I very much hope that Fugaku will show itself to be highly effective in real-world applications and will help to make Society 5.0 a reality.”