Fugaku is a petascale

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

at the Riken Center for Computational Science in

Kobe Kobe ( ; , ), officially , is the capital city of Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. With a population of around 1.5 million, Kobe is Japan's List of Japanese cities by population, seventh-largest city and the third-largest port city after Port of Toky ...

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

. It started development in 2014 as the successor to the K computer and made its debut in 2020. It is named after an alternative name for

Mount Fuji is an active stratovolcano located on the Japanese island of Honshu, with a summit elevation of . It is the highest mountain in Japan, the second-highest volcano on any Asian island (after Mount Kerinci on the Indonesian island of Sumatra), a ...

. It became the fastest supercomputer in the world in the June 2020

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

list as well as becoming the first

ARM architecture ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of reduced instruction set computer, RISC instruction set architectures (ISAs) for central processing unit, com ...

-based computer to achieve this. At this time it also achieved 1.42 exaFLOPS using the mixed fp16/fp64 precision HPL-AI benchmark. It started regular operations in 2021. Fugaku was superseded as the fastest supercomputer in the world by

Frontier A frontier is a political and geographical term referring to areas near or beyond a boundary. Australia The term "frontier" was frequently used in colonial Australia in the meaning of country that borders the unknown or uncivilised, th ...

in May 2022.

Hardware

The supercomputer is built with the Fujitsu A64FX microprocessor. This CPU is based on the ARM version 8.2A processor architecture, and adopts the Scalable Vector Extensions for supercomputers. Fugaku was aimed to be about 100 times more powerful than the K computer (i.e. a performance target of 1 exaFLOPS). The initial (June 2020) configuration of Fugaku used 158,976 A64FX CPUs joined using Fujitsu's proprietary torus fusion interconnect. An upgrade in November 2020 increased the number of processors.

Software

Fugaku uses a "light-weight multi-kernel operating system" named ''IHK/McKernel''. The operating system uses both

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

and the McKernel light-weight kernel operating simultaneously and side by side. The infrastructure that both kernels run on is termed the ''Interface for Heterogeneous Kernels'' (IHK). The high-performance simulations are run on McKernel, with Linux available for all other

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX; ) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines application programming interfaces (APIs), along with comm ...

-compatible services. Fugaku uses a three-tiered storage system to provide parallel storage to the compute nodes. The first-level LLIO storage is an NVM-based file I/O accelerator co-developed by Fujitsu and RIKEN that is allocated on per-job storage basis to the compute nodes for storing temporary data with low latency. The LLIO system stages data in and out of a second-level Fujitsu Exascale File System (FEFS), which uses disk-based storage based on Lustre software to provide a large persistent high-performance filesystem, and a tape-based archive to store a large volume of infrequently accessed data. Besides the system software, the supercomputer has run many kinds of applications, including several benchmarks. Running the mainstream HPL benchmark, used by

, Fugaku is at petascale and almost halfway to exascale. Additionally, Fugaku has set world records on at least three other benchmarks, including HPL-AI; at 2.0 exaflops, the system has exceeded the exascale threshold for the benchmark. A description of that benchmark is as follows:

Performance

The reported initial performance of Fugaku was a Rmax of 416 petaFLOPS in the FP64 high performance LINPACK benchmark used by the TOP500. After the November 2020 upgrade in the number of processors, Fugaku's performance increased to a Rmax of 442 petaFLOPS. In 2020, Fugaku also attained top spots in other rankings that test computers on different workloads, including

Graph500 The Graph500 is a rating of supercomputer systems, focused on data-intensive loads. The project was announced on International Supercomputing Conference in June 2010. The first list was published at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in Nov ...

, HPL-AI, and

HPCG benchmark The High Performance Conjugate Gradients Benchmark (HPCG benchmark) is a supercomputing benchmark (computing), benchmark test proposed by Michael Heroux from Sandia National Laboratories, and Jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek from the University of ...

. No previous supercomputer has ever led all four rankings at once. After a hardware upgrade, as of November 2020, "Fugaku increased its performance on the new mixed precision HPC-AI benchmark to 2.0 exaflops, besting its 1.4 exaflops mark recorded six months ago. These represent the first benchmark measurements above one exaflop for any precision on any type of hardware." (a 42% increase) Interestingly, the Arm A64FX core-count was only increased by 4.5%, to 7,630,848, but the measured performance rose much more on that benchmark (and the system does not use other compute capabilities, such as GPUs), and a little more on TOP500, or by 6.4%, to 442 petaflops, a new world record and widening the gap to the next computer by that much. For the HPCG benchmark, it is 5.4 times faster, at 16.0 HPCG-petaflops, than the number two system,

Summit A summit is a point on a surface that is higher in elevation than all points immediately adjacent to it. The topographic terms acme, apex, peak (mountain peak), and zenith are synonymous. The term (mountain top) is generally used only for ...

, which happens to also be second on TOP500. As of November 2020, Fugaku's performance surpassed the combined performance of the next 4 supercomputers on the TOP500 list, and surpassed the remaining top-10 computers on the HPCG benchmark by a margin of 45%.

History

On May 23, 2019, Riken announced that the supercomputer was to be named Fugaku. In August 2019, the logo for Fugaku was unveiled; it depicts

, symbolising "Fugaku's high performance" and "the wide range of its users". In November 2019, the prototype of Fugaku won first place in the

Green500 The Green500 is a biannual ranking of supercomputers, from the TOP500 list of supercomputers, in terms of energy efficiency. The list measures performance per watt using the TOP500 measure of high performance LINPACK benchmarks at double-preci ...

list. Shipment of the equipment racks to the Riken facility began on December 2, 2019, and was completed on May 13, 2020. In June 2020, Fugaku became the fastest supercomputer in the world in the TOP500 list, displacing the IBM Summit. Fugaku has been used for research on masks related to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

. In 2023, Fugaku has been used to develop Japanese language Generative AI Models by the

Tokyo Institute of Technology The Tokyo Institute of Technology () was a public university in Meguro, Tokyo, Japan. It merged with Tokyo Medical and Dental University to form the Institute of Science Tokyo on 1 October 2024. The Tokyo Institute of Technology was a De ...

, Riken Research Institute, Fujitsu Ltd and

Tohoku University is a public research university in Sendai, Miyagi, Japan. It is colloquially referred to as or . Established in 1907 as the third of the Imperial Universities, after the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University, it initially focused on sc ...

Cost

In 2018, Nikkei reported the programme would cost (c. US$ billion).

Comparison

References

External links

*
Satoshi Matsuoka - Supercomputing for Everyone, SIAG_SC(28th June 2022)
(Lecture about Fugaku for general audience)
Fugaku Virtual Tour
{{Fujitsu 2020 in science Exascale computers Fujitsu supercomputers Petascale computers Riken 64-bit computers