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 dubbed Fugaku, installed in the city of Kobe by the government-sponsored institute Riken, took first place in a twice-yearly speed ranking released Monday. The Japanese machine carried out 2.8 times more calculations per 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.
Since 2009, three successive computer systems at the Oak Ridge lab – the Jaguar, Titan and Summit – have been rated the world’s fastest computers.
In May 2019, then Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced that Oak Ridge would get one of the world’s first exascale computers, dubbed the Frontier built by Cray Inc. and Advanced Micro Devices. The $600 million Frontier computer system is expected to go into operation in Oak Ridge in 2021 and will be the largest of three exascale computers planned by the Energy Department, including the Aurora and El Capitan computers at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.