The world's fastest crowned supercomputer is deployed in the fight against coronavirus.
Japanese supercomputer Fugaku took first place on Monday, making calculations 2.8 times more per second than an IBM machine in the United States.
The American car, called Summit, has reached the top of the biennial Top500 list in the previous four four times.
Fugaku's victory broke a long string of US-China dominations, returning Japan to the top for the first time in 11 years.
Top500 ranks the most powerful undistributed computer systems in the world.
Fugaku has already been put to work to combat coronavirus, simulating how droplets would spread in office spaces with installed partitions or in full trains with windows open.
When fully operational next year, experts hope the machine will also be able to narrow down the search for effective treatments for the virus.
The small machine lives in the city of Kobe and was developed for six years by the Japanese technology company Fujitsu and the government-supported Riken Institute. Its name is another way of saying Mount Fuji.
His performance was measured at 415.53 petaflops, 2.8 times faster than the 148.6 petaflops in second place. The American machine is housed in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. A supercomputer is rated more than 1,000 times faster than a normal computer.
"I hope cutting-edge IT developed for it contributes to great progress in difficult social challenges like Covid-19," said Satoshi Matsuoka, head of the Center for Computational Science at Riken.
Third place on the list went to another IBM system, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, while fourth and fifth places were occupied by computers in China.
Fugaku also passed the supercomputer performance rankings, becoming the first to sit simultaneously on top of the Graph500, HPCG and HPL-AI rankings.
