Fujitsu to build new supercomputer to boost AI research in Japan

The supercomputer will be the second most powerful in Japan and sixth most powerful worldwide

Fujitsu is developing a new supercomputer that Japanese industry, government, and academic institutions will be able to use to assist in AI research and development.

According to Fujitsu, the system - dubbed ' AI bridging green cloud infrastructure supercomputer ' - is expected to deliver a peak performance (double-precision floating point operations) of 19.3 quadrillion computations a second (petaflops). The theoretical peak performance of half-precision floating point operations is expected to be 300 petaflops.

It is expected that the supercomputer will be ready to use before the end of the next year. It will use 120 4U Fujitsu Primergy GX2570 servers and eight NVIDIA A100 high-end GPUs, while also featuring two 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and 11.2 petabytes of storage.

The supercomputer will be hosted at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) Kashiwa Centre, and will be suitable for large-scale analysis using AI, such as deep learning. It will work together with the AIST's existing AI bridging cloud infrastructure system (ABCI), also built by Fujitsu.

ABCI was unveiled in August 2018, enabling hundreds of start-ups, general electrical appliance makers and others to engage in advanced AI processing through coordinating big data, algorithms and computational power.

Fujitsu anticipates that the combined computational power of 'AI Bridging Green Cloud Infrastructure' and the ABCI system will be able to provide a theoretical peak performance of double-precision floating-point operations of 56.7 petaflops and half-precision floating-point operations of 850 petaflops.

This level of performance will rank second in Japan and sixth worldwide, according to the top 500 supercomputer rankings announced in June 2020. Japanese supercomputer Fugaku took the top spot in that list.

Fugaku was jointly developed by Fujitsu and Japanese research institute Riken. It features chip technology from Arm Ltd and uses Fujitsu's 48-core A64FX system-on-chip. It can carry out over 415.5 quadrillion computations a second and can test thousands of substances per week in the search for a coronavirus cure.

Fugaku is the first Japanese supercomputer in nine years to get the first spot in Top 500 list. The latest list includes 226 supercomputers from China, 114 from the US, and 30 from Japan.

Last month, chip maker Nvidia announced that it was building a new supercomputer to help scientists address medical challenges - including those presented by coronavirus.

According to Nvidia, this advanced computing system - which will be the most powerful in the UK - will be capable of delivering 400 petaflops of AI performance and eight petaflops of Linpack performance.

It will rank 29th on the Top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers and will also be among the world's three most energy-efficient supercomputing systems on the Green500 list.