Japan wants to build the world’s first “zeta-level” supercomputer

Japan wants to have the most powerful supercomputer in the world, being the first nation to break the “zeta level” performance barrier. In other words, the country is already working on the creation of the Fugaku Next, a professional computer being created to offer performance in the order of zetaFLOPS.

To put things into perspective, the current fastest supercomputer in the world is Frontier, located in Tennessee, United States. Using AMD Epyc CPUs and AMD Instinct GPUs, this machine currently sits at the top of the TOP500 benchmark, with an estimated performance of 1,206 exaFLOPS.

The prefix zeta denotes roughly a thousand times exa. Thus, Fugaku Next could be up to a thousand times more powerful than Frontier and other current supercomputers that operate at the exaFLOPS level. This would increase the calculations per second from the current one quintillion per second to up to one sextillion per second.

The project is an initiative of the Japanese government, with the expectation of providing up to US$750 million in investment for the construction of Fugaku Next. It is not yet known which companies will collaborate, but potential names include Fujitsu and RIKEN. These were the companies that helped with the current Fugaku, a Japanese supercomputer that operates at 442 petaFLOPS.

Supercomputer potential is incredible, but so is its consumption

Supercomputers are currently used in many different areas of research and science, helping to calculate climate, astrophysical and pharmaceutical models – not to mention the development of AI, of course. Fugaku Next can take these models further, even being able to simulate the functioning of a human brain in its entirety.

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However, all this performance comes at an equally impressive energy cost. According to TechSpot, experts estimate that the Fugaku Next would need the electricity generated by 21 nuclear power plants to operate. It is not yet known how Japan will be able to meet this demand or what the environmental impact will be.