Japan to start building its first 'zeta-class' supercomputer in 2025

TPO - Japan has announced plans to start building its first "zeta-class" supercomputer next year. When completed, it will be 1,000 times faster than today's most powerful supercomputers.

The "zeta-class" supercomputer will be the successor to Japan's Fugaku supercomputer, located at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Hyogo. (Photo: STR/JIJI PRESS)

Japan's new state-of-the-art supercomputer, which cost more than $750 million to build, is expected to go into operation in 2030.

Plans for the new machine, just announced by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), reveal for the first time that the supercomputer can reach speeds in the zetaFLOPS scale, something that has never been achieved before.

Floating point operations per second (FLOPS) is a measure of how fast a computer can solve problems. A supercomputer running at 1 zetaFLOPS can perform one sextillion (1 followed by 21 zeros) calculations per second. Today's most powerful supercomputers have only just broken the exaFLOPS barrier, meaning they can perform more than a quintillion (1 followed by 18 zeros) calculations per second.

The decision to build such a super-powered machine was made to keep up with the development of scientific research using AI, Japanese news site Nikkei reported.

The proposed supercomputer 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 dethroned by the US Frontier supercomputer (1.2 exaFLOPS) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee in 2022. Fugaku is currently considered the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world.

The new computer, currently called “Fugaku Next,” will be built by Japanese companies RIKEN and Fujitsu, both of which are involved in the construction of Fugaku. To allow for cross-compatibility between Fugaku and Fugaku Next, Fugaku Next will likely use components designed by Fujitsu, according to computer news site Tom’s Hardware.

One of the biggest challenges engineers will face when building a new supercomputer is finding a way to run it efficiently. By 2023, computer experts predict that a zeta-class machine built using current supercomputer technology will require the equivalent energy output of 21 nuclear power plants, according to news site HPCwire.

Ha Thu

According to Live Science

Source: https://tienphong.vn/nhat-ban-bat-dau-xay-dung-sieu-may-tinh-zeta-class-dau-tien-vao-nam-2025-post1671855.tpo