TOKYO: Fujitsu today announced that Fugaku(1), a supercomputer jointly developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu, was ranked No. 1 in the 58th TOP500 list of the world’s supercomputers. Fugaku also took the No.1 position in the international ranking HPCG (High Performance Conjugate Gradient), which measure the processing speed of the conjugate gradient method(2) often used in practical applications including in the field of industry, and in the ranking of HPL-AI, which measures the performance of low-precision computing often used in AI such as deep learning.

These rankings were announced on June 22 at the ongoing virtual event ISC (International Supercomputing Conference) High Performance 2020 Digital.

The achievement of No. 1 in these three rankings indicates the overall high performance of Fugaku and demonstrates that it can sufficiently respond to the needs of Society 5.0(3) which aims to build a smart society that creates new value. Fugaku can contribute in such society as an information infrastructure technology accelerating the solution of social problems with simulation while advancing the development of AI technologies as well as technologies related to information distribution and processing.

Supercomputer Fugaku (in development and preparation)Supercomputer Fugaku (in development and preparation)

Measurement Results of Fugaku

1. TOP500

The Fugaku system ranked first in the TOP500 list consisted of 396 racks (152,064 nodes(4), approximately 95.6% of the entire system), and the LINPACK performance was 415.53 PFLOPS (petaflops) with the computing efficiency ratio of 80.87%. It is the first time for a Japanese supercomputer to take the first place in TOP500 since the K computer claimed No.1 in November 2011 (the 38th TOP 500 list). Fugaku’s performance is approximately 2.8 times that of the supercomputer ranked second in the TOP500 list with148.6 PFLOPS.

2. HPCG

For this benchmark, 360 racks (138,240 nodes, approximately 87% of the entire system) of Fugaku were used to achieve the high score of 13,400 TFLOPS (teraflops). This proves that the supercomputer can efficiently handle such real-world applications in the field of industry and perform well. Moreover, Fugaku exceeds the performance of the No.2 supercomputer (2,925.75 TFLOPS) by approximately 4.6 times.

3. HPL-AI

Unlike the conventional listings of TOP500 and HPCG which measure the performance of double-precision arithmetic logic unit, HPL-AI is a new benchmark established in November 2019 as an index for evaluating calculation performance that takes into account the capabilities of single-precision and half-precision arithmetic logic units used in artificial intelligence. For this measurement, a high score of 1.421 EFLOPS (Exa FLOPS) was recorded using 330 racks (126,720 nodes, approximately 79.7% of the entire system) of Fugaku.

This is also a historical record, as Fugaku achieved 1 exa (10 raised to the power of 18) in one of HPL benchmarks for the first time in the world. This proves Fugaku’s capability to contribute to the advancement of Society 5.0, as a research platform for machine learning and big data analysis.