Supercomputer Fugaku

The story

Named after Mount Fuji, Fugaku was developed jointly by RIKEN and Fujitsu on Port Island in Kobe as Japan's national flagship supercomputer. Succeeding the K computer in 2020, Fugaku achieved history by becoming the first Arm-architecture machine to top the global Top500 rankings, holding first place for two full years with 442 petaflops. Utilizing 158,976 water-cooled Fujitsu A64FX chips with high-bandwidth memory (HBM2), Fugaku delivered unprecedented real-world application performance, famously modeling airborne viral transmission dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Notable

• Ranked #1 on the Top500 list for four consecutive cycles (2020–2021) using an Arm instruction set architecture.
• Powered by 158,976 Fujitsu A64FX processors implementing Armv8.2-A Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) technology.
• Reached 442 petaflops double-precision and over 2 exaflops in mixed-precision artificial intelligence benchmarks.
• Played a celebrated role during the COVID-19 pandemic simulating airborne droplet dispersal and identifying drug therapies.

Expansions

• 2014: project initiated as FLAGSHIP 2020 to succeed the K computer
• 2020: achieves #1 on Top500, HPCG, HPL-AI, and Graph500 simultaneously
• 2021: officially begins full shared operations for academic and industrial research