TOP    Events & Outreach    News & Announcements    Results of the World Ranking for the Supercomputer Fugaku and Future Initiatives by RIKEN – Maintained World Top-Level Performance – (May 2024)

The RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) has announced that the supercomputer Fugaku, which began shared use in March 2021, has achieved first place for the ninth consecutive time in the 'HPCG (High Performance Conjugate Gradient)' and 'Graph500' rankings. It also secured fourth place in the 'TOP500' and 'HPL-AI Mixed Precision' (HPL-MxP) rankings. These results will be announced on May 13th, local time, during the 'ISC High Performance 2024' conference currently held both at the Congress Center Hamburg and online.

Fugaku was developed based on a co-design[1] philosophy, enabling high-performance and low-power execution across various applications. It has generated significant outcomes through digital twins[2] and other applications in fields such as life sciences, disaster prevention, energy, manufacturing, fundamental sciences, and socio-economics, contributing to the realization of Society 5.0[3]. Despite new machines being developed in countries like the USA, Fugaku has continuously received high evaluations in multiple supercomputing rankings for over four years, demonstrating its strong international competitiveness as a foundation for our country's research and development.
RIKEN is currently working on 'Virtual Fugaku,' which replicates the software environment of Fugaku on other supercomputers and cloud services. This initiative aims to make Fugaku’s rich software environment accessible worldwide to anyone. Moreover, the 'AI for Science' initiative, which aims to bring new innovations to scientific research through AI, is gaining global attention. By developing large-scale language model distributed parallel training methods and various applications utilizing AI and simulation on Fugaku, we contribute to enhancing domestic AI research capabilities.
Further, to expand the computational realm, we are developing system software that integrates quantum computers (QCs) with HPC to facilitate the full use of QCs and establishing a platform for quantum research.
RIKEN continues to research next-generation systems in the post-Fugaku era, aiming for the early realization of research DX. As part of this, we have been engaged in a next-generation computational infrastructure research project since August 2022, commissioned by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. This project aims to propose systems that could realize Society 5.0, considering the needs of science, industry, and society, and explores architectures, system software, libraries, and applications for next-generation computational infrastructures, identifying technical challenges and requirements.
The expertise and capabilities developed through Fugaku and its applications are expected to significantly contribute to these ongoing and future research efforts.

RIKEN Center for Computational Science Director Satoshi Matsuoka said,″The supercomputer Fugaku began its trial operations in the first half of 2020 and has now appeared in the biannual global supercomputer performance rankings for the ninth time. It has consistently demonstrated its world-class capabilities by ranking first in the most critical benchmark indicators for actual application performance, HPCG (High Performance Conjugate Gradient) and Graph500, which measures big data performance. Additionally, Fugaku placed fourth in the traditional TOP500 ranking and also fourth in the HPL-AI benchmark, a measure of AI performance.

As countries around the world continue to develop new supercomputers through both public and private efforts, competition, particularly in the field of generative AI, has intensified. Maintaining top-tier performance over four years can be attributed to Fugaku’s original hardware design and the continuous advanced research by RIKEN R-CCS (RIKEN Center for Computational Science).

The capabilities developed at our center through Fugaku are reflected in these rankings. Currently, we are initiating and advancing numerous projects related to the research and development of next-generation computational infrastructures that will follow Fugaku. Specifically, we are working on "Virtual Fugaku," which involves virtualizing Fugaku's software and disseminating its results worldwide. Additionally, RIKEN "AI for Science" initiative aims for a dramatic evolution in science through AI, just has been done for advanced physical simulations on supercomputers, especially projects such as “Fugaku-LLM” that trained a Japanese LLM from scratch using over 10,000 nodes of Fugaku, as well as "TRIP-AGIS" project, which seeks scientific innovation through generative AI. We are also pursuing the JHPC-quantum project, which integrates quantum computing with supercomputing to expand new computational realms. Moreover, research and development for the next generation of supercomputer technologies are being conducted in collaboration with top domestic and international institutions.

We expect these research and development efforts to greatly contribute to the overall advancement of our Japan's scientific and technological research and to the application in industries and early societal implementation.

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Supplementary Information

[1] Co-design
The practice of collaboratively designing hardware and software from the early stages of development, typically synchronizing software design with hardware to optimize the entire system.
[2] Digital Twin
A technology that realizes objects in the virtual world that are identical twins of real-world objects, allowing for highly accurate simulations in real-time, expected to be utilized across various fields.
[3] Society 5.0
A concept following hunter-gatherer (Society 1.0), agricultural (Society 2.0), industrial (Society 3.0), and information societies (Society 4.0). It is a vision proposed in Japan's Fifth Science and Technology Basic Plan, representing a new societal stage where emerging technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and big data are integrated across all industries and social life, aiming to achieve economic development and solve societal challenges simultaneously.

The insights and capabilities cultivated by Fugaku are thus not only reflected in these rankings but are also being leveraged in discussions and research for the next generation of supercomputing development initiated by our center.

(May 13, 2024)