Tokyo – The creators of the world’s fastest supercomputer want to make one thing perfectly clear: they were no trying to be number one.
“Of course he was happy and relieved,” Satoshi Matsuoka told CBS News about the time he learned that his team’s “Fugaku” supercomputer had taken the crown for the fastest computing speed on earth. But for Matsuoka and his team, honor simply claimed a strategy of focusing on practical applications.
Fugaku (pronounced foo-gah-koo and named for Japan’s highest mountain, Fuji) completes a decade-long, $ 1 billion mission by several thousand developers at the RIKEN Center for Computer Science and Fujitsu computer manufacturer, administered by the government.
RIKEN / brochure
The machine topped four supercomputing benchmarks, including processing speed, artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and big data analytics, earning it the number one spot on the Top500 list of global supercomputers. this week.
Ease of use was the mantra for Fugaku developers. Despite its world speed: 415 trillion calculations per second, Fugaku was designed to run common applications like Word or Powerpoint, making it widely accessible to researchers in sectors as diverse as medicine, automotive design, and civil engineering.
Rather than creating something like, say, a Formula One car (fast, but not particularly useful), Matsuoka said his team “wanted something fast, but that your grandmother could drive – to the supermarket!”
Fugaku runs 2.8 times faster than the IBM Summit supercomputer, the previous record holder running at the U.S. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and marks the first such victory for Japan in nine years in a supercomputing field that has been dominated by the US and China
RIKEN
With processing units occupying a room that could comfortably accommodate two high school gyms at Riken’s offices in the western city of Kobe, Fugaku is similar to “a heavily beefed-up version of the ordinary smartphone.” However, it has the computing strength of 20 million smartphones.
Coronavirus supercomputing
Although it won’t be fully installed until next year, Fugaku has already started making a living, producing simulations that demonstrate the terrifying ease with which coronavirus It spreads between human hosts on trains and in other indoor environments.
The videos, which are widely shown on television here, highlighted the risks of congregating in crowded and poorly ventilated spaces, how droplets are emitted from the edges of facial masks, and what happens when a hospitalized patient coughs. Despite their brevity, the simulations were deceptively complex to create, Matsuoka said, incorporating large amounts of data about air flow and how virus-laden droplets travel through the air.
“If you have a very dry environment, these droplets evaporate and become aerosols and therefore are carried much further,” he said. “You really need a ventilation device to get rid of these sprays as quickly as possible.” He said that in wet spaces, the drops are not aerosolized, but tend to fall on the desks, which must be disinfected more diligently.
Fugaku, who can go through three months of typical computing before lunchtime, is also reviewing a database of 2,000 medications to discover what formulations could be used to mitigate the symptoms of COVID-19. The search has already yielded some promising potential treatments that have yet to be considered by medical scientists, Matsuoka said.
The team is also working on a molecular simulation of how tip-top coronaviruses bind to human cells, a valuable tool for drug discovery and diagnosis.
“This is without supercomputers it is not possible, “said Matsuoka.” There is no way you can take pictures of how a virus attaches itself to a human cell. “
Winning is good, “useful” is the key
In addition to researching biomedicine, pre-testing cars for collision safety, disaster-proof design for buildings, designing tomorrow’s car engines, and developing entirely new materials, Fugaku is also being deployed for weather and climate forecasting, especially disaster warnings.
That work is a particular priority for Japan, one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to earthquakes, typhoons, tsunamis and floods.
RIKEN
“Sudden torrential rains are becoming more common in Japan and the southern US due to global warming, but these are very localized phenomena,” said Matsuoka. Among the concepts Fugaku is studying are highly specific emergency forecasts, which could give residents a 30-minute warning on their smartphones when danger approaches.
Japan’s high-performing computer scientists faced scrutiny in 2009, when an earlier supercomputer project known as “K” fell into the sights of a crusading legislator from the Japan Democratic Party. He demanded to know why taxpayers should be committed to what seemed, to the uninitiated, as a national vanity project that destroys the budget.
“Is there any reason why Japan needs to be number 1?” she stated, playing for the television audience. “Is number 2 unacceptable?” The science establishment learned its lesson.
“We absolutely worry” about the disastrous attempt to justify Japan’s supercomputer mission, Matsuoka said, calling the audience “a fiasco.”
The bureaucrats “could never explain why it was important. So we set out to build a machine that excelled in applications and was useful.”
Being named number one, he said, was the icing on the cake.
.
