The energy challenge posed by supercomputers that push the boundaries
Energy challenges and technological innovations are at the heart of the race to develop next-generation supercomputers
1000000000000000000000. A trillion (according to the long-scale numbering system), a thousand billion billion, 21 zeros. A number that is difficult to write, describe or even imagine, but one that is set to become the new benchmark for supercomputer processing speed within the next five years.
Japan is aiming, in fact, to develop the world’s first supercomputer capable of 1 zettaFLOPS by 2030 – that is, one capable of performing a trillion calculations per second. This represents a threshold that has not yet been reached.
The operational phase of the project officially began in recent weeks. On 18 June, the Japanese multinational Fujitsu Limited announced that it had secured a contract from the Japanese research and development institute RIKEN to design the next-generation supercomputer. This initial basic design phase is scheduled to run until 27 February 2026.
The new supercomputer, provisionally named FugakuNEXT, represents the next generation of Fugaku, which currently ranks seventh in the list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
At the top of the TOP500 list are three US supercomputers: El Capitan, Frontier and Aurora, installed at the US Department of Energy’s laboratories. El Capitan can perform up to 2,746 million billion operations per second. As explained in Lab24’s in-depth article, if every person on Earth were to perform one operation per second for a year, they would carry out ‘only’ 258 million billion operations.
