Japanese Petascale Supercomputers

Japan has built a sequence of leading national supercomputers dedicated to climate, materials and general scientific computing, most of them hosted by government research institutes rather than universities or companies alone. The Earth Simulator, deployed at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, was built specifically for climate and ocean modeling and was the world's fastest supercomputer from 2002 to 2004. The K computer, installed at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe and named for the Japanese word for ten quadrillion, used a distributed-memory design spanning more than eighty thousand compute nodes and briefly led the TOP500 list in 2011. Fugaku, its successor at the Riken Center for Computational Science, began development in 2014, debuted in 2020, and is named for an alternate name of Mount Fuji, continuing the same national research-institute lineage of Japanese flagship supercomputing.