Japan has announced that it plans to start building the first “zeta-class” supercomputer next year. Once fully operational, it will be 1,000 times faster than today’s most powerful supercomputers.
The supercharged machine, which could cost more than $750 million to build, will help Japan keep up with the pace of artificial intelligence (AI) development and is expected to be fully online by 2030.
Plans for the new machine – released by Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) – show that the supercomputer could reach zetaFLOPS-scale speeds, which has never been achieved before.
Floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) are used to measure the speed at which computers can solve problems – where one floating-point operation represents a single calculation.
A supercomputer with a speed of 1 zetaFLOPS could perform one sextillion (1 followed by 21 zeros) calculations per second.
Its construction could cost more than $750 million
Today’s most powerful supercomputers have barely broken the exaFLOPS barrier, meaning they can perform just over a quintillion (1 followed by 18 zeros) calculations per second.
The decision to build such a superpower machine was made “to keep up with the development of scientific research using artificial intelligence,” Japanese news site Nikkei wrote.
The proposed supercomputer is touted as the successor to Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer (0.44 exaFLOPS), which previously held the title of the world’s fastest supercomputer until it was dethroned in 2022 by the US Frontier supercomputer (1.2 exaFLOPS) at Oak Ridge Tennessee National Laboratory. Fugaku is currently considered the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world, he writes LiveScience.
The new machine, currently called “Fugaku Next”, will be built by Japanese companies RIKEN and Fujitsu, which were both involved in the construction of Fugaku.
The project would be completed by 2030
To allow cross-compatibility between Fugaku and Fugaku Next, the latter will likely use components designed by Fujitsu, according to computer news site Tom’s Hardware. However, little else is known about the components that will be fitted to the proposed car.
One of the biggest challenges engineers will face in building the new supercomputer is finding a way to make it work efficiently.
In 2023, computer experts predicted that a zeta-class machine built using current supercomputer technologies would require an amount of energy equivalent to the output of 21 nuclear power plants, computing news site HPCwire previously reported.
MEXT has allocated about $29 million for the first year of the project, but could allocate up to $761 million over the course of the project, which is scheduled to be completed by 2030, according to Tom’s Hardware.
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Source: www.descopera.ro
