Japan is once again building a landmark high-performance computing system \u2014 not simply by chasing speed, but by rethinking how technology can best serve the nation\u2019s most urgent scientific needs.<\/p>\n
At the FugakuNEXT International Initiative Launch Ceremony held in Tokyo on Aug. 22, leaders from RIKEN, Japan\u2019s top research institute, announced the start of an international collaboration with Fujitsu and NVIDIA to co-design FugakuNEXT, the successor to the world-renowned supercomputer, Fugaku.<\/p>\n
Awarded early in the process, the contract enables the partners to work side by side in shaping the system\u2019s architecture to address Japan\u2019s most critical research priorities \u2014 from earth systems modeling and disaster resilience to drug discovery and advanced manufacturing.<\/p>\n
More than an upgrade, the effort will highlight Japan\u2019s embrace of modern AI and showcase Japanese innovations that can be harnessed by researchers and enterprises across the globe.<\/p>\n
The ceremony featured remarks from the initiative\u2019s leaders, RIKEN President Makoto Gonokami and Satoshi Matsuoka, director of the RIKEN Center for Computational Science and one of Japan\u2019s most respected high-performance computing architects.<\/p>\n
Fujitsu Chief Technology Officer Vivek Mahajan attended, emphasizing the company\u2019s role in advancing Japan\u2019s computing capabilities.<\/p>\n
Ian Buck, vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing at NVIDIA, attended in person as well to discuss the collaborative design approach and how the resulting platform will serve as a foundation for innovation well into the next decade.<\/p>\n
Momentum has been building. When NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang touched down in Tokyo last year<\/a>, he called on Japan to seize the moment \u2014 to put NVIDIA\u2019s latest technologies to work building its own AI, on its own soil, with its own infrastructure.<\/p>\n FugakuNEXT answers that call, drawing on NVIDIA\u2019s whole software stack \u2014\u00a0 from NVIDIA CUDA-X<\/a> libraries such as NVIDIA cuQuantum<\/a> for quantum simulation, RAPIDS for data science, NVIDIA TensorRT for high-performance inference and NVIDIA NeMo for large language model development, to other domain-specific software development kits tailored for science and industry.<\/p>\n Innovations pioneered on FugakuNEXT could become blueprints for the world. <\/p>\n What\u2019s Inside<\/p>\n FugakuNEXT will be a hybrid AI-HPC system, combining simulation and AI workloads.<\/p>\n