Japan plans to build world's most powerful supercomputer: What you should know about it

Japan has announced plans to build a new supercomputer that will succeed the world's fastest, Fugaku. Development will begin next year with the support of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) and Fujitsu. The new supercomputer will have a performance of 50 exaflops and will be able to reach peak values ​​at the zettaflop scale, making it the most powerful in the world for working with artificial intelligence algorithms.

According to Tom's Hardware, each supercomputer node will have a peak performance of several hundred teraflops for double-precision calculations, about 50 petaflops for FP16 calculations, and about 100 petaflops for 8-bit calculations. To ensure high data transfer rates, it is planned to use HBM memory, which will provide a throughput of several hundred terabytes per second.

The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) will allocate 4.2 billion yen (about $29.05 million) for the first year of development, and the total government funding for the project will be more than 110 billion yen (about $761 million). RIKEN will lead the development, and Fujitsu will be responsible for creating the equipment, with a special emphasis on the use of Japanese technology.

Although the architecture of the new Fugaku Next supercomputer has not yet been specified, it is expected to use central processors with specialized accelerators or a combination of them with graphics processors. If Fujitsu processors are chosen, they can receive up to 150 Armv9 cores.

Completion of the project and the release of the new supercomputer are planned for 2030.