- Its provisional name is ‘Fugaku Next’, it will be ready in 2030 and will cost approximately 750 million dollars.
- Its performance will allow it to break through the exaFLOPS barrier and enter the zetaFLOPS realm.
Frontier, the ambitious machine from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (USA), is currently the most powerful supercomputer in existence. According to the analysts who compiled the TOP500 ranking , it brings together no less than 8,699,904 cores and delivers an Rmax performance of 1,206 petaFLOPS/s, an Rpeak of 1,714.81 petaFLOPS/s and an energy consumption of 22,786 kW. It is clear that we are dealing with a colossal machine that is already helping scientists to obtain very promising results thanks to its enormous computing power.
Just last week we told you that a group of researchers has managed to largely understand the magnetic interactions that occur in the nucleus of the calcium-48 atom with the help of Frontier. This supercomputer has led the TOP500 list for just over two years, but its days as the most powerful machine in existence are numbered. The RIKEN research institute in Japan and Fujitsu are already working on a titanic supercomputer intended to replace Fugaku , which currently occupies fourth place in the TOP500 ranking .
The big problem is not power; it is electricity consumption
It will be tentatively called Fugaku Next and will most likely be the most powerful supercomputer available when it is ready in 2030. In fact, researchers at the RIKEN institute predict that it will be 1,000 times faster than the most capable supercomputers currently in operation. It will cost around $750 million, but more importantly, its performance will allow it to break through the exaFLOPS barrier and enter the zetaFLOPS realm . It is difficult to get a precise idea of the sheer computing power of these machines.
An interesting side note: the performance of the most powerful supercomputers currently in operation is measured in exaFLOPS, meaning they are capable of carrying out more than a quintillion calculations per second in the short numbering system used by the English-speaking world (a 1 followed by 18 zeros). Fugaku Next’s performance, however, will, according to its designers, exceed a sextillion in the short numbering system (a 1 followed by 21 zeros). Japanese researchers hope to use this machine for both scientific applications and artificial intelligence (AI).
Everything we’ve seen so far is very good. It’s not easy to develop a machine with such high performance because, among other things, it requires working hand in hand with a truly advanced cooling system. Even so, the biggest challenge facing the technicians at the RIKEN and Fujitsu laboratories who are working on Fugaku Next is optimizing its energy efficiency. In fact, according to a report prepared in 2023 by HPCwire , a machine of these characteristics requires the energy produced by no less than 21 medium-sized nuclear power plants. It is clearly a huge obstacle. If Japan really wants to develop a zeta-class supercomputer, it will have to tear it down.
