Fugaku—the Arm technology-based supercomputer jointly developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu—was awarded the number one spot on the Top500 list for the second time in a row. This achievement further highlights the rapidly evolving demands of high-performance computing (HPC) that Arm technology uniquely addresses through the unmatched combination of power efficiency, performance, and scalability.

In addition to the great work RIKEN and Fujitsu have done, we're seeing more adoption for Arm-based solutions across our ecosystem. ETRI, the national computing institute of the Republic of Korea, recently announced plans to adopt the upcoming Neoverse V1 (formerly code-named Zeus) CPU design, which feature Arm Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE), for its K-AB21 system. ETRI has set a goal of 16 teraflops per CPU and 1600 teraflops per rack for AB 21 (which stands for 'Artificial Brain 21') while reducing power consumption by 60% compared to its target.Meanwhile, Ampere Computing, Sandia National Laboratories, University of Bristol, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) provided details on their Arm-based HPC plans at the Arm High-Performance Computing User Group (AHUG) meeting earlier this month. At this month's SC20 event, SiPearl, a company formed by the European Processor Initiative, also reiterated that it will adopt Neoverse V1 for its Rhea processor, which is part of SiPearl's exascale compute project. And, NVIDIA also announced researchers are achieving a nearly 26x performance boost for Arm in HPC with NVIDIA A100 GPUs and Arm Neoverse-based Ampere Altra CPUs.

While it's still early days for seeing the impact of many of these new Arm-based solutions, we are proud of the positive impact Fugaku has already had in COVID-19 related research efforts. Although formally launched only a few months ago, Fugaku has been deployed for five different COVID-19 research projects, including one examining how the virus circulates in the air, and another to determine the efficacy of more than 2,000 existing drugs.