The superfast Japanese supercomputer Fugaku is available virtually in the cloud at AWS. The cloud provider’s Graviton chips take over the function of the Fujitsu A64FX processors.

Japan’s RIKEN Center for Computer Science has launched a virtual copy of its Fugaku supercomputer. From mid-2020 until Frontier’s arrival in the US in 2022, Fugaku was the fastest supercomputer in the world. The system still stands out in the top 500 because it is built entirely with ARM-based processors.

RIKEN wants to make the power of the supercomputer available to a wider audience and has therefore decided to virtualize Fugaku. The added value of the supercomputer is a combination of all the nodes with their raw computing power and the software that makes it all work. The Fugaku virtual computer runs a custom open source software stack in AWS. The code is available in a Singularity container.

The transition to the cloud is possible in part because of the similarities between the physical supercomputer’s original Fujitsu A64FX processors and AWS’ Graviton processors, both of which rely on Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) instructions for acceleration.

Software ecosystem

It’s unclear exactly how fast the virtual Fugaku is, but that’s not so important. The virtual supercomputer won’t outperform the original. However, supercomputers are unique systems that researchers tailor their software to. Thanks to the availability of cloud versions of Fugaku, all that software work suddenly becomes much more relevant. A wider audience can now build on the foundation researchers have laid with Fugaku.

RIKEN hopes that the Fugaku stack can become a kind of standard. If future supercomputers use the same software and do not need to be customized, HPC applications can be used more widely and flexibly. This vision is not new and is difficult to put into practice. After all, every supercomputer is unique and there are good reasons to continually adapt the operating system to the complex hardware.