Japan now has the world’s fastest computer which is now being deployed for coronavirus research. The Fugaku supercomputer is located at the Riken Center for Computational Science in Kobe. For the first time since 2011 it has taken the lead away from the US and China. It can perform more than 415 quadrillion computations a second, 2.8 times faster than the Summit system developed by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US, which held the title when the twice-yearly rankings were last published in November, 2019. The computer was developed by Fujitsu and the Riken Center, a government-backed research institute in the western city of Kobe, It has150,000 high-performance processing units and can test thousands of substances a week. Costing 1.5 billion dollars the computer will be fully operational in 2021. In terms of the pandemics itwill help identify treatments for Covid-19 from about 2,000 existing drugs, including those that have yet to reach the clinical trial stage.
While nuclear powers use such computers to simulate nuclear explosions, and perform virtual weapons testing, in seismically active Japan, Fugaku can be used to model the impact of earthquakes and tsunamis, while mapping out escape routes according to the Nikkei business newspaper, cited by The Guardian.
