Fujitsu’s Supercomputer Fugaku has secured first place in the TOP500 supercomputing charts. The machine, located at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science, Japan, managed to beat Summit and Sierra, two U.S.-based systems built by IBM and operated out of the United States. China, which has been flagging in the last few years occupied the fourth and fifth spots with the Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe-2A respectively.
The new champ, Fugaku, reported a High Performance Linpack (HPL) score of 415.5 petaflops, beating Summit by a factor of 2.8x. Interestingly, Fugaku is powered by a 48-core A64FX SoC making it the first ARM-based system to reach number one on the TOP500 ranking. TOP500 also rates the most efficient systems with its Green500 rankings; Fugaku managed to secure ninth place in this chart.
According to TOP500, the aggregate list performance has now reached 2.23 exaflops, that’s up from 1.65 exaflops during the last check-in six months ago. The new entry point on the list has reached 1.24 petaflops. TOP500 said that 51 new systems joined the list this time around, a record low since TOP500 began in 1993.
While it has slid down the top 10, China still dominates the TOP500 list boasting 226 systems. The U.S. is in second place with 114 systems, Japan has 30 systems, France has 18, and Germany has 16. While China has many more systems, the United States has a better aggregate list performance with 644 petaflops over China’s 565 petaflops. The next set of results is due to arrive in November 2020.