In one leg of the race for tech supremacy, superpowers China and the US have been pipped by a third contender — Japan.
Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer elbowed out America’s Summit as the most powerful supercomputer, according to June’s Top500 ranking. Fittingly for these pandemic times, Fugaku is devoting its considerable might — 415.53 petaflops, or a quadrillion floating-point operations per second — to matters of health and the environment.
That in itself is pretty novel. Supercomputers are often seen as the brains of a nation, playing a role in national security and technological one-upmanship. China still leads in sheer numbers. With 226 ranked supercomputers it has twice as many as America. Among the others in the top five, Japan, France and the UK trail well behind.