Fujitsu is credited with developing the world’s most powerful supercomputer, the Fugaku. Earlier this month, the Japanese IT services company began offering high-performance computing as a service (HPCAAS), which will allow firms to take advantage of the 442 petaflops of computing power provided by Fugaku. Petaflop is a measure of a supercomputer’s performance, and how many calculations it can do per second. In simple words, a human who has been doing one calculation per second for 31,688,765 years is what a computer system running at 1PFLOP can do in one second. In an interview, Fujitsu’s Chief Technology Officer Vivek Mahajan said that HPC as a Service has a huge future in India, as well as more powerful future technologies like quantum computing. Edited excerpt:
What is the state of advanced computing in India today?
There is a great need for computing in India, but we believe that in the future, HPC is what every end user, like you or me, will use. They need that today, but they can’t use it because neither you or I, nor many companies, can afford a supercomputer.
The way we see it is by computing as a service. HPC will be offered through the cloud, and as a user you should only care about what your problem is, not whether it requires quantum or non-quantum, etc.
Do you already see Indian businesses turning to HPC as a service? What will it be used for?
Well, it (Fugaku) is not available in India yet. But I see a lot of use for it. For example, (this is useful) if you want to invest your money in retail, stocks, etc., and you want to model that to find the best price.
This is a very simple problem, and you as an end consumer may decide to run two cycles in a supercomputer (supercomputers are priced based on the time spent running simulations on them).
We simulated COVID on Fugaku to calculate the right angle to wear a mask to reduce the impact of the virus and people should distance themselves from each other.
We have also used it for tsunami prediction, which saves lives. We can do the same for cyclones or floods in India. In addition, traffic, logistics, etc. are real problems today.
But there are companies in India who are facing such problems without HPC; Why would we need HPC?
I wouldn’t say they are solving it (in the best way). How difficult is the problem of covid to solve? I don’t think it’s easy to model on a general computing platform.
They are probably using on-premises HPC for weather forecasting, but (with HPC as a service) each state can make its own flood forecast, etc., and they don’t need HPC.