The list of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers has updated once more; A Japanese supercomputer has topped the biannual supercomputer speed rankings: the Fugaku supercomputer created by the RIKEN Institute and the Fujitsu tech company in Japan.
IBM's Summit Supercomputer has been pushed to second place because Fugaku can crunch through 415.5 petaflops or quadrillion computations per second, 2.8 times as fast as IBM's Summit.
In some unique functions, the machine can reach more than 1,000 petaflops or one exaflop. In comparison, the next-gen Xbox graphical processing power coming later this year offers 12 teraflops - or around a hundredth of a petaflop.
While inside your laptop, you may have a single dual-core or quad-core processor, Fugaku uses a custom 48-core chip from Fujitsu and packs 158,976 of them. The supercomputer requires a severe amount of computing power to beat the remaining top 500, as Fugaku has got it, Fugaku is more than six years old and worth US$ 1.2 billion.
Even the giant computer will not be fully operational until next year. Still, its enormous processing power is already being put to good use as it runs at RIKEN in Kobe, Japan. The newly crowned fastest supercomputer is working on ways to fight the coronavirus and has provided a little smart analysis of how the infectious dot spreads in the air.
It's a reminder that these giant room-sized systems do more than just set records - they deal with all sorts of complicated calculations involving a vast number of variables, from climate forecasting at the molecular level to modeling chemical compounds.
For the first time since Japan topped the list since 2011, Fugaku is also the first supercomputer to make the first place on ARM architecture. ARM processors are plain and more power-effective than other types, so mobile devices have ARM processors that help to reduce heat and power draw needs.
That doesn't mean that ARM chips are less powerful though - much depends on how the software uses them, and the other components installed with it. In the last few days, you may have heard that Apple is turning its laptops to ARM processors instead of Intel processors in the next two years.
The supercomputers top 500 lists published for the 55th time, It comes out twice a year. This version of the list includes machines pumping out a total of 2.23 exaflops of power, up from 1.65 exaflops six months ago.
Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Eric Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; And Martin Muer of ISC Group, Germany compiled the list.
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