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Japan has announced the successor to its legendary Fugaku supercomputer, which is currently ranked the fourth fastest computer system in the world by Top500.org. The Arm-based system is a half-exabyte scale computer, as it can churn out 442 petaFLOPS in Linpack. Its successor will offer far more performance and go beyond even exascale (1,000 petaFLOPS) to Zetta-scale, which is 1,000 exaFLOPS.
MEXT, the country’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, announced the next-generation supercomputer. The system will cost more than $750 million and will be active by the year 2030, according to LiveScience. This computer is simply named Fugaku Next and will be a Zetta-class system, or 1,000 times more powerful than the AMD-powered Frontier system, ranked #1 in the world at 1.2 exaFLOPS.
This simple illustration highlights the next-generation’s systems’ capabilities when it comes to “AI for Science.”
Credit: Riken/Fujitsu
The impetus for the new machine—wait for it—is AI, of course. The country’s government says it’s needed to keep up with scientific research using AI, and it will be built by both RIKEN and Fujitsu, which also built Fugaku. It’s unclear how a computer 1,000 times more powerful than today’s beefiest system would be powered and cooled; as LiveScience notes, it’s thought that a Zetta-scale system would need the power of 21 nuclear reactors to operate. And we thought a Core i9-14900K sucked down a lot of power.
The twist is that in the next few years, numerous efficiencies will be realized in semiconductor manufacturing as TSMC, Intel, and Samsung move to 2nm transistors and beyond. It’s theoretically possible that such a machine will be plausible using today’s methods but at a much larger scale. However, six years from now, at least one other Zetta-class machine will likely be operational—though we can’t say for sure, as Frontier’s replacement is supposed to be 5x more powerful, not 1,000x.