The competition to build the most powerful supercomputer is heating up, with Japan embarking on a mission to create the first Zetta-class supercomputer. However, according to recent reports, Oracle might actually develop one before Japan. Regardless of who achieves this milestone first, Japan is already working on its next supercomputer, known as ‘Fugaku Next’.

Fugaku Next is set to replace Japan’s current fastest supercomputer, Fugaku, and will be over 2000 times faster. Fugaku can deliver up to 442 petaFLOPS, or 442 quadrillion floating-point operations per second, a performance level that earned it a spot on the TOP500 supercomputers list, where it currently ranks fourth. In contrast, Fugaku Next is projected to reach a performance of one zettaFLOPS, or one sextillion floating-point operations per second.

For comparison, the world’s fastest supercomputer, Frontier, can reach 1.206 exaFLOPS, or 1.206 quintillion floating-point operations per second. Fugaku Next is expected to be about 1000 times more powerful than Frontier. While this level of performance is currently theoretical, Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) is leading the project and is prepared to invest over $750 million to make it a reality.

In the first year, MEXT will allocate around $29 million to the project, with plans to increase funding as development continues in the coming years. The project is expected to be completed by 2030, potentially making Fugaku Next the first supercomputer to achieve zettaFLOPS performance.

However, Oracle announced yesterday that its OCI Supercluster might be the first to reach this milestone, with an even greater performance of up to 2.4 zettaFLOPS, or 2.4 sextillion floating-point operations per second. To achieve this, Oracle plans to use 131,072 of NVIDIA’s upcoming Blackwell datacenter GPUs, nearly three times the number of GPUs currently used by Frontier.

However, operating Fugaku Next will require an enormous amount of power, equivalent to the output of 21 nuclear power plants, posing one of Japan’s biggest challenges in running the supercomputer efficiently. Fugaku Next is expected to be cross-compatible with its predecessor, Fugaku, as both will use components from the same manufacturer, Fujitsu. With this ambitious project, Japan aims to make significant advancements in various fields such as AI, machine learning, astrophysics, energy research, medical research, climate modeling, and more.

Source: Techspot