Supercomputer beats human four sextillion to 13 in ‘Super Keisan Battle’ at Japanese tech show

The Fugaku supercomputer was again one of the unlikely stars of the recent Nico Nico Super Conference in Japan. In a re-run of last year, Fugaku was the brains behind the ‘Super Keisan Battle’ competition, where humans ritually humiliate themselves in a calculation race with a petascale supercomputer. Up for grabs was a free full day to utilize Fugaku however you might want, a ‘Fugaku One-Day Unlimited Ticket.’ However, the competition page contains an admission that this is a game “that no one can win” against Fugaku (machine translation).

Human 13, Fugaku 442,010,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

The Fugaku Face Off is pretty simple, and kind of stacks things even more in the supercomputer’s favor. According to the instructions we saw, a competition entrant must solve as many numerical additions as possible in 10 seconds. Most seemed to achieve 10 or 11, but Tomooo_108, for example, managed to solve 13 sums in the allotted time. This pales into insignificance vs the supercomputer, though. Fugaku managed to complete 442,010,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 sums during the 10 second battle. That’s four sextillion four hundred twenty quintillion one hundred quadrillion calculations.

Competitors mostly found the scale of their defeat against Fugaku quite amusing, in social media comments we have seen. Some joked that if you could beat Fugaku, you wouldn’t need to use it for the free day. Others pondered over the cosmic collapse that would occur if a human could move a pen fast enough to record four sextillion sums in 10 seconds. Good news - even if you lost against Fugaku, there were consolation prizes such as a miniature Fugaku to take home (expand the Tweet embedded above to see them).

At the Nico Nico Super Conference, which seems to be dominated by tech entertainment phenomena (e.g. VTubers and Cosplay), the Fugaku Face Off is another fun diversion, but with a serious twist. The supercomputer makers remind entrants that Fugaku, and its brethren, are used for tasks like research on disaster prevention – flood damage simulation, optimal evacuation plans, and so on.

Fugaku by the numbers

Fugaku, currently ranked sixth place in the TOP500 supercomputer list, delivers 442 PFlop/s of compute. It wields 158,976 nodes (each powered by a Fujitsu A64FX (48+4 core) microprocessor), packs 4.85 PiB RAM, and runs a custom Linux kernel.

The last time we reported on Fugaku, was a story largely about its successor. The collaborative work between RIKEN and Fujitsu should start this year and the goal is to deliver a ZetaFLOPS-scale supercomputer by 2030.

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