Japan is preparing to embark on the development of the next world’s most powerful supercomputer with a budget exceeding $750 million, slated to be operational by 2030.
Japan has announced plans to commence the construction of the world’s first zeta-class supercomputer next year. Once fully operational, this new machine will be 1,000 times faster than the most powerful supercomputers currently available. This new supercomputer, with a cost of over $750 million, aims to help Japan keep pace with the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and is expected to be operational by 2030, according to Live Science.
Supercomputer Fugaku located at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Hyogo. (Photo: Nikkei).
The construction plan was unveiled by Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), revealing that the supercomputer could achieve unprecedented speeds at a zetaFLOPS scale.
FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second) is a metric for measuring a computer’s computational performance, quantified by the number of floating-point calculations a computer can perform in one second. A supercomputer with a speed of one zetaFLOPS could execute 1,000 trillion trillion calculations per second. The most powerful supercomputers currently only exceed the exaFLOPS barrier, which means they can perform a quintillion calculations per second. The decision to create this supercomputer is aimed at enabling Japan to keep up with the advancements in scientific research utilizing AI.
This new machine is considered a successor to Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer (0.44 exaFLOPS), which previously held the title of the world’s fastest supercomputer until it was surpassed in 2022 by the Frontier supercomputer in the U.S. (1.2 exaFLOPS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Fugaku is currently the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world.
The supercomputer, temporarily named “Fugaku Next”, will be developed by the Japanese companies RIKEN and Fujitsu, both of which were involved in the production of Fugaku. To ensure cross-compatibility between Fugaku and Fugaku Next, the latter will likely utilize components designed by Fujitsu. However, Japanese authorities have not disclosed specific details regarding the components to be installed in the new machine.
One of the most significant challenges engineers face when building this new supercomputer is determining how to operate it efficiently. In 2023, computer experts predict that a zeta-class machine using current supercomputing technology will require energy equivalent to the output of 21 nuclear power plants.
MEXT plans to allocate approximately $29 million for the first year of the project but will distribute an additional $761 million throughout the project, expected to be completed by 2030. By then, Fugaku Next will likely be the most powerful supercomputer on Earth.
