Commemorative ceremony marking launch of international initiative to develop framework for “FugakuNEXT”

On August 22, a commemorative ceremony was held at the RIKEN Tokyo Branch to mark the start of development for the new flagship system (development codename: “FugakuNEXT”), the next generation of the “Fugaku” supercomputer.

RIKEN is the lead developer of the “FugakuNEXT” project, which commenced in January this year. In June, Fujitsu Limited was selected to carry out the basic design of the overall system, compute nodes, and CPU components. Fujitsu is already working on the basic design in collaboration with RIKEN. This time, RIKEN selected NVIDIA Corporation to implement the basic design of the accelerator section. The ceremony was held to commemorate the launch of this development framework through this three-party international collaboration.

At the ceremony, Takashi Fuchigami, Director of the Research Promotion Bureau, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, gave the opening speech. This was followed by speeches from RIKEN President Makoto Gonokami, Satoshi Matsuoka, Director, RIKEN Center for Computational Science Director Satoshi Matsuoka, Vivek Mahajan, Corporate Executive Officer, Corporate Vice President, CTO, in charge of Systems Platform, Fujitsu, and NVIDIA Vice President of Hyperscale & High-Performance Computing Ian Buck, who all presented initiatives and outlooks regarding the “FugakuNEXT” project.

Commemorative photo session

Front row, left to right: Fujitsu Vice President Mahajan, MEXT Director of the Research Promotion Bureau Fuchigami, RIKEN President Gonokami, NVIDIA Vice President Buck; Back row, third from left: R-CCS Director Matsuoka

Scene from the ceremony