Japan supercomputer ranked fastest in world

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 supercomputer dubbed Fugaku, installed in the city of Kobe, Japan, 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.

Supercomputers have become a symbol for both technical and economic competitiveness. The room-size systems are used for complex military and scientific tasks, including breaking codes, modeling climate change, and simulating new designs for cars, weapons, aircraft and drugs. Riken has said Fugaku is being used to help study, diagnose and treat COVID-19.

China placed 226 systems in the latest Top500 list; the U.S. total was 114, although they accounted for a greater share of aggregate computing power.

Japan has a history of pushing the state of the art in computing. An example is the

K Supercomputer, its predecessor at Riken, which took the No. 1 spot on the Top500 list in 2011 before being displaced the next year by a system at Livermore.

Horst Simon, who has studied Fugaku as deputy director of research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, called it a “very remarkable, very admirable” product. But it may not last long as the world’s fastest supercomputer in view of forthcoming Department of Energy systems at Oak Ridge and Livermore and likely advances in China, he said.

The Top500 list, compiled by researchers in the United States and Germany, is being released to coincide with a supercomputing event that is ordinarily held in Frankfurt, Germany, but that is going virtual this year because of the pandemic.