Supercomputers can perform 1,000 trillion calculations per second

Japan has announced plans to start building the world’s first zeta-class supercomputer next year. Once fully operational, the machine will be 1,000 times faster than today’s most powerful supercomputers. The new supercomputer, which will cost more than $750 million, will help Japan keep pace with the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and is expected to be operational by 2030, according to Live Science.

The plan to build the machine, announced by Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports and Science (MEXT), reveals a supercomputer that can reach unprecedented speeds at the zetaFLOPS scale.

FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second) is a measure of a computer’s computing performance, measured by the number of floating point calculations a computer can perform in one second. A supercomputer with a speed of one zetaFLOPS can perform 1,000 trillion calculations per second. The most powerful supercomputers today have only just surpassed the exaFLOPS barrier, meaning they can only perform one trillion calculations per second. The decision to build a supercomputer was made to help Japan keep up with the development of scientific research using AI.

The new machine is seen as a successor to Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer (0.44 exaFLOPS), which previously held the title of world’s fastest supercomputer until it was surpassed in 2022 by the US Frontier supercomputer (1.2 exaFLOPS) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Fugaku is currently the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world.

The supercomputer, tentatively named “Fugaku Next,” will be built by Japanese companies RIKEN and Fujitsu, both of which have previously worked on Fugaku. To ensure cross-compatibility between Fugaku and Fugaku Next, the latter is likely to use Fujitsu-designed components. However, Japanese officials have not disclosed details of the components that will be installed on the new machine.

One of the biggest challenges engineers face when building a new supercomputer is figuring out how to run it efficiently. By 2023, computer experts predict that a zeta-class machine using current supercomputer technology will require the equivalent of 21 nuclear power plants.

MEXT will spend about $29 million for the first year of the project but will allocate an additional $761 million over the course of the project, which is expected to be completed in 2030. By then, Fugaku Next will likely be the most powerful supercomputer on Earth.