Japan's Fugaku retakes supercomputing crown from US and China

Riken-Fujitsu system clocks in nearly three times faster than top IBM machine

The Fugaku supercomputer is shown off to the media on June 16 at the Riken Center for Computational Science in Kobe. (Photo by Tomoki Mera)

AKIRA OIKAWA and YUKI MISUMI, Nikkei staff writers

June 23, 2020 00:00 JST

TOKYO -- Japan's new government-backed supercomputer ranks as the fastest in the world, breaking the U.S.-China duopoly for the first time in over eight years, international rankings released Monday show.

The Fugaku supercomputer developed by Fujitsu and Riken, Japan's national research institute, led the TOP500 list at 415 petaflops, or quadrillions of floating point operations per second. This was nearly triple the speed of IBM's second-ranked Summit, which came in at 148 petaflops.