TOKYO and WAKO, Japan, Nov. 18, 2019 — Fujitsu Limited and RIKEN today announced that a prototype of the supercomputer Fugaku⁽¹⁾ being jointly developed by the two parties took No.1 in the Green500, a global ranking based on the energy efficiency of supercomputers.

The ranking was announced today at SC19, an international conference on high-performance computing (HPC) in the U.S. The Green500 ranks the world’s top500 fastest computing supercomputers by power consumption and efficiency among the TOP500⁽²⁾ supercomputers.

The system that topped the Green500 was manufactured by Fujitsu as a prototype of Fugaku and installed at the company’s Numazu Plant. Developed by Fujitsu, this system is equipped with 768 A64FX CPUs that support the Arm SVE (Scalable Vector Extension) instructions for the first time in the world.

This performance measurement demonstrated that Fugaku technologies have the world’s highest energy efficiency, achieving 1.9995 PFLOPS (petaflops) in calculation speed for simultaneous linear equations (LINPACK³) against 2.3593 PFLOPS in a peak performance, and 16.876 GFLOPS/W (gigaflops per watt) in a performance per 1 watt of power consumption.

Going onwards, Fujitsu will continue to manufacture and install systems to complete Fugaku. The company will endeavor to apply the supercomputer’s energy saving performance to a wider range of customers, offering commercial models PRIMEHPC FX1000 and PRIMEHPC FX700 which have been developed utilizing Fugaku technologies.

As the main developer, RIKEN is striving to create one of the world’s most advanced general-purpose systems, proceeding with the development and deployment of Fugaku, which is planned for general operation starting around 2021. As an important research foundation supporting Society 5.0⁽⁴⁾, Fugaku is expected to be used as a basis for new fields of application such as AI (artificial intelligence) and big data, in addition to simulations to improve drug discovery, disaster prevention and industrial competitiveness.

“This award means that we have achieved the world’s highest level of energy efficiency, which is one of the three major development goals of the Fugaku supercomputer: high application performance, energy efficiency and user-friendliness,” Naoki Shinjo, Corporate Executive Officer, Fujitsu Limited said. “Fugaku is a system equipped only with a general-purpose CPU, which can process various applications without using accelerators such as GPUs. In other words, in this ranking, it was verified that Fugaku technologies consume less power than other systems that use accelerators, and that they can perform applications with about 1/3 less energy than other systems that use only general-purpose CPUs.”

“Both the know-how we have accumulated over many years in developing CPUs, and our solid effort to optimize the system from the initial stage of design considering performance and power consumption, have contributed to this achievement,” Shinjo added. “We hope that Fugaku which combines versatility with energy efficiency, will be widely used as a supercomputer to realize Society 5.0.”

“With Fugaku, we succeeded in developing a general-purpose Arm CPU with the world’s highest energy efficiency, far exceeding our targets through Co-design,” Satoshi Matsuoka, Director, Riken-Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) said. “While GPU machines dominate high ranks, it is groundbreaking for general-purpose CPU machines to top the list. By becoming a new standard, general-purpose CPUs with different levels of energy efficiency are expected not only to generate revolutionary HPC results, but also to be applied to new technologies such as AI (artificial intelligence) and big data, which will realize Society 5.0.”