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A Japanese supercomputer has taken the top prize in a renowned global speed competition for the first time since 2011, beating out the Chinese and American competitors that usually win. Fugaku, as the supercomputer is called, clocked in a score of 415.53 petaflops on the biannual Top500 List.

To put that into context, a system capable of one-petaflop speed can perform one quadrillion "floating point operations," or computer arithmetic calculations. To keep up with a one-petaflop supercomputer, you'd have to perform one calculation every second for 31,688,765 years, according to Indiana University. Multiply that by 415.53 petaflops, and that's one calculation every second for about 13.2 billion years. Phew.

This marks the first time an Advanced Reduced instruction set computing Machine (ARM) supercomputer has taken the lead slot on the Top500 List. Usually, ARM processorswhich require fewer transistors, are cheaper, use less power, and create less heatare relegated to the world of mobile devices like smartphones, tablets, or laptops, making Fugaku's win particularly compelling.

"For Arm, this achievement showcases the power efficiency, performance and scalability of our compute platform, which spans from smartphones to the worlds fastest supercomputer," Rene Haas, president of Arm's IP Products Group, said in a prepared statement. Arm Holdings is the Softbank-owned semiconductor company that first introduced ARM chips.

Fugaku beat out its nearest competitor, Summitan IBM-developed supercomputer that lives at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennesseeby 266.93 petaflops. That supercomputer previously topped the Top500 List in the last round of competition, back in November, when it ranked in at 148.6 petaflops.

The latest ranking included four supercomputers from the U.S., two from Italy, two from China, one from Japan, and one from Switzerland.

Fugaku is installed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan. The original idea came about back in 2014, and the supercomputer won't even be fully operational until April 2021.

At RIKEN, around 3,000 researchers use the machine for drug discovery; personalized and preventative medicine; natural disaster simulations; and studies into the fundamental laws of the universe. And on an experimental basis, researchers are even using Fugaku for COVID-19 research into diagnostics, therapeutics, and simulations showing the spread of the virus.

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"Fugaku was developed based on the idea of achieving high performance on a variety of applications of great public interest...and we are very happy that it has shown itself to be outstanding on all the major supercomputer benchmarks," Satoshi Matsuoka, director of the RIKEN Center, said in the statement. "I hope that the leading-edge IT developed for it will contribute to major advances on difficult social challenges such as COVID-19."

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Read more:
Meet Fugaku, the New Fastest Computer in the World - Popular Mechanics

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