Fugaku, the World's Most Powerful Supercomputer from Japan, is Set to Aid in COVID-19 Research

Sieeka Khan, Tech Times 10 March 2021, 10:03 am

The world's fastest supercomputer is finally up and running after seven years of development. Fugaku supercomputer was completed in Japan and is now available for researchers to use for different projects like discovering new drugs, fighting climate change, and studying COVID-19.

Fugaku supercomputer

The project to build the Fugaku supercomputer started in 2014 and was hosted at the Japanese scientific research institute Riken.

Riken collaborated with Fujitsu, and the device was pitched to become the future pillar of Japan's high-performance computing infrastructure, according to News18.

In May 2020, the delivery of Fugaku's 432 racks was completed, and since then, the trials of the system have been on-going. The device's main project was to speed up the research that is needed to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

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The supercomputer is now open for shared use, and Japan's Research Organization for Information Science and Technology or RIST has chosen 74 research projects that will be implemented starting April.

RIST has also encouraged researchers to submit their proposals for new projects. The organization had invited all applications to be sent as part of a call for Trial Access Projects.

Both Riken and Fujitsu will continue to monitor the supercomputer's operation to ensure stable performance while working to improve the user environment and give better supercomputing technologies.

RIST president Yasuhide Tajima stated that the ultra-high-performance computer Fugaku is expected to go into full-scale operation.

Tajima said he is looking forward to seeing this external brain, which was developed by humanity. This will help expand knowledge, allowing people to gain deeper insights into the foundation of matter in both time and space, and give humans better structural and functional analysis of life, society and industry, thus enabling more accurate predictions.

Fugaku's development

Fugaku is made to carry out high-resolution, long-duration, and large-scale simulations and boasts up to 100 times the K supercomputer's application performance, the predecessor of Fugaku, which was decommissioned in 2019.

Thanks to its power, Fugaku was named the most powerful computer system for two consecutive terms in the Top500 list.

Fugaku has 442 petaflops. This device stands a long way ahead of its competitors as it has three times more capability than the number two system on the Top500 list, the IBM's Summit, which has a performance of 148.8 petaflops.

The simulations of Fugaku are paired with data science and artificial intelligence, and it is expected to produce high-level results to solve problems at a new scale.

Among the many anticipated results feature high-speed drug discovery simulations, early detection of diseases, accurate predictions, and natural disasters simulation.

The supercomputer is also expected to create new materials for next-generation fuel cells and increase insights into fundamental science questions like how the universe was created.

The results from the trials carried out by Fugaku are already very promising. Researchers in Japan have been using the supercomputer to test the efficiency of existing drugs against COVID-19. They are finding ways to mitigate the transmission of the virus through droplet analysis.

Meanwhile, Japan's Tokyo Medical and Dental University or TMDU and Fujitsu Laboratories revealed that they are working towards completing a new project because the supercomputer helped them achieve cancer gene analysis in less than a day.

The study being done by Fujitsu Laboratories and TMDU can help establish new cancer therapies as it allows for a better understanding of the connection between cancer cells and cancer-related genes.