ARM adds power to supercomputer elbow

Recognised as the world’s most efficient supercomputer on the Green500 list in November 2019, Fugaku was also given top honours on the HPCG list, a ranking of benchmarks across real-world applications, and the HPL-AI, which rates performance on tasks used in artificial intelligence applications.

“We are incredibly proud to see an Arm-based supercomputer of this scale come to life and thank RIKEN and Fujitsu for their commitment and collaboration,” said Rene Haas, president, IP Group, Arm. “Powering the world’s fastest supercomputer is a milestone our entire ecosystem should be celebrating as this is a significant proof point of the innovation and momentum behind Arm platforms making meaningful impact across the infrastructure and into HPC.”

This achievement represents for the industry a significant evolution in the needs of the modern infrastructure.

Compute efficiency is more important than ever, developers are demanding more efficiency and flexibility, and the cloud is driving massive change across the ecosystem.

Arm has answered the challenge with its Neoverse roadmap and portfolio which aims to deliver the performance, efficiency, and scalability required to enable the next generation of HPC deployments.  

The company has also made significant investments across the HPC software ecosystem, enabling seamless migration across instruction sets, cross-platform development, profiling, and debug.

Most recently, the company added additional porting capabilities to Arm Compiler for Linux and Arm Allinea Studio to help accelerate applications on current and future Arm CPUs, as more projects of this scale will be based on Arm because of its openness, efficiency, and software ecosystem maturity.

The announcement at ISC signals the direction that industry is headed, and through this collaborative effort, a shared purpose of enabling greater choice and flexibility to multiple segments of the infrastructure market has emerged.

The Fugaku supercomputer, which is located at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science, is the flagship system designed to support a number of applications that will address both social and scientific issues as Japan works to achieve “Society 5.0”.

Fugaku will accelerate research that spans drug discovery and weather and climate forecasting, to new production processes, and is already being used in the fight against COVID-19 to gain a better understanding of the novel coronavirus.