RIKEN’s Fugaku Passes Major Milestone and Goes Public

RIKEN’s Fugaku, currently the fastest high performance computer (HPC) in the world, recently passed a critical development milestone by completing its initial testing phase. As a result, the system will become available for general shared use on March 9, 2021. The Fugaku supercomputer has been in development since 2014, and in addition to its world-leading computational performance capabilities, its overall design was targeted with an application-first philosophy to tackle some of the world’s most pressing challenges including medicine, pharmacology, disaster prediction and prevention, environmental sustainability and energy. Fugaku is a joint development effort between RIKEN, Japan’s largest HPC research organization, and Fujitsu, one of Japan’s largest commercial suppliers of high[1]end computing systems.