Japan's Fugaku Rated World's Fastest Supercomputer
A Japanese supercomputer has been declared the world's most powerful for the first time in nine years.
Fugaku, developed by the RIKEN research institute and electronics giant Fujitsu, took the first place in a twice-yearly speed ranking which was announced by an international conference of experts on Monday.
The Japanese machine is installed at a facility in the city of Kobe, western Japan. It entered into the world ranking for the first time.
Fugaku topped other supercomputers in four of six major categories, including computing speed.
It accomplished more than 400 petaflops, or quadrillions of floating-point operations, per second.
That was about three times faster than a US supercomputer which ranked atop the previous list.
Fugaku also took the first spots in three other categories that measure performance in computational methods for industrial use, artificial intelligence applications, and big data analytics.
RIKEN officials said that Fugaku had the world's best and most remarkable performance in the major categories. They expressed hope that Fugaku and its technologies will help resolve a range of social issues.
In 2011, RIKEN's K supercomputer, the predecessor of Fugaku, became the world's fastest computer.
