Japan Ranks 1st In The World's Fastest Supercomputer

JAKARTA - Japan is known as a technology country. Even the super computer assembled in the country of Sakura managed to outperform its competitors, such as China and the United States (US).

Quoting The Verge, Tuesday, June 23, Japan managed to rank first in the Top500 Supercomputer in the world. This Japanese-made supercomputer, named Fugaku, can even process data twice as fast as existing supercomputers.

In comparison, Fugaku managed to process data at a speed of 415.5 petaflops (a unit of the number of computations performed by a computer, Petaflops means that it is able to process at a rate of quadrillion operations per second (1 quadrillion = 1 million billion)). That result is 2.8 times faster than the supercomputer made by IBM at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

Of the overall Top500 ranking, 226 supercomputers were the result of China's development. Meanwhile, 114 others came from the United States, followed by Japan, which has 30 supercomputers with an aggregate of 644 petaflops.

Indeed, the use of supercomputers, quite a lot to help researchers and scientists in processing data quickly. The Riken research institute itself uses Fugaku to process data and information, in diagnosing suitable drugs for COVID-19.

"This is so extraordinary, so amazing," said the co-director of research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Horst Simon.

I installed the contact tracing app for # COVID-19 on my Smartphone. Simulation on #Fugaku indicates we need 60% distribution for effectiveness. I encourage people in Japan to install to protect yourself & save lives. It was pro reviewed to be privacy safe. https://t.co/p2xWyvOJlR

- Satoshi Matsuoka (@ProfMatsuoka) June 22, 2020

The name Fugaku itself can be interpreted as Mount Fuji. The development of the systems and technology used by this supercomputer, costs up to 1 billion US dollars.

The supercomputer, which was developed with the research institute Riken and Fujitsu, uses a 48-core A6FX as its chipset. This is the first time that ARM-made processors are at the top as a super fast computer base.

The reason is, most supercomputers use chipset configurations made by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. On the other hand, Apple is also starting to look to ARM as its new partner in producing Mac devices.