Japan is currently preparing a new supercomputer with absolutely incredible power, several orders of magnitude beyond what the most powerful machines currently available are capable of.
To put things in context, Japan is already a major specialist in high-performance computing, or HPC. It is home to the Fugaku, a powerhouse capable of delivering more than 500 petaflops, or 500 million billion operations per second. This machine dominated the world rankings for two long years — an eternity in this discipline that is progressing very quickly.
However, it had to give up its crown in the summer of 2022 with the arrival of the Frontier. This is the first computer to pass the exaflops mark, or one billion billion operations per second.
Although it has since been joined by the Aurora in this very closed circle, at present, it still occupies the first place of the Top500, the biannual ranking of supercomputers. The Fugaku, for its part, has been relegated to fourth position… but it is preparing to make its big comeback in a new form, in the manner of the protagonist of an anime that the Japanese are so fond of.
Fugaku NEXT, the first supercomputer zetascale
Indeed, the Japanese government’s announcement mentions a device called “Fugaku NEXT”, which will apparently be able to cross the barrier of… zetaflops. This corresponds to 1000 billion billion operations per second — three orders of magnitude beyond the incredible Frontier, no less! This would be a world first that would put it way, way ahead of the Top500 if it were deployed today.
According to the Nikkei news agency, the construction will be handled by two industry leaders who were already involved in the design of the first Fugaku, namely RIKEN and Fujitsu. According to the same source, the Japanese government has financed part of the project to the tune of 110 billion yen, or about 684 million euros. But as for the technical aspect, almost no details have leaked.
It is not clear what kind of hardware the designers intend to rely on to achieve such performance. The total number of cores or the size of the device, for example, are unknown. However, we can expect the Fugaku NEXT to be loaded with Nvidia acceleration cards, particularly because of the tasks it seems to be designed to accomplish. Indeed, the Japanese government’s press release (or at least the version translated by DeepL) makes several references to artificial intelligence — a technology in which the green giant has largely specialized.
It will therefore be appropriate to follow the project closely while waiting for it to go into service, which is planned for 2030. It will be particularly interesting to see if other equally ambitious projects will emerge in the meantime, particularly in the United States, which now has the first three supercomputers in the Top500.
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