“Japanese Supercomputer Is Crowned World’s Speediest: In the Race for the Most Powerful Computers, Fugaku, a Japanese Supercomputer, Recently Beat American and Chinese Machines”, 2020-06-22 (; backlinks; similar):
China and the United States are locked in a contest to develop the world’s most powerful computers. Now a massive machine in Japan has topped them both.
A long-awaited supercomputer called Fugaku, installed in the city of Kobe by the government-sponsored Riken institute, took first place in a twice-yearly speed ranking that was released on Monday. The Japanese machine carried out 2.8× more calculations a second than an IBM system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which Fugaku bumped to second place in the so-called Top500 list. Another IBM system, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, slid to third place in the ranking from second, while systems in China moved to the fourth and fifth spots from third and fourth.
…Japan remains a relatively small player in supercomputing. China placed 226 systems in the latest Top500 list; the US total was 114, though they accounted for a greater share of aggregate computing power. But Japan has a long history of pushing the state-of-the-art in computing. A prominent example is the K Supercomputer, its predecessor at Riken, which took the No. 1 spot on the Top500 list in 2011 before being displaced the next year by a system at Livermore.
…Horst Simon, who has studied Fugaku as deputy director of research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, called it a “very remarkable, very admirable” product. But it may not last long as the world’s fastest supercomputer in view of forthcoming Department of Energy systems at Oak Ridge and Livermore and likely advances in China, he said.
Fugaku, another name for Mount Fuji, required some lofty spending. The six-year budget for the system and related technology development totaled about $1 billion, compared with the $600 million price tags for the biggest planned US systems.