RIKEN announced the start of an international collaboration with Fujitsu and NVIDIA to co-design FugakuNEXT, the successor to the supercomputer Fugaku. The initiative was unveiled at the FugakuNEXT International Initiative Launch Ceremony in Tokyo on Aug. 22, where RIKEN president Makoto Gonokami and Satoshi Matsuoka, director of the RIKEN Center for Computational Science, outlined the project. Fujitsu chief technology officer Vivek Mahajan and Ian Buck, vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing at NVIDIA, attended and stressed the collaborative design approach. The contract was awarded early so the three partners can work side by side to shape the system´s architecture around Japan´s most urgent research priorities.
FugakuNEXT is being designed as a hybrid Artificial Intelligence and high-performance computing system that combines simulation and Artificial Intelligence workloads. The design will feature FUJITSU-MONAKA-X CPUs paired with NVIDIA technologies through NVLink Fusion, a new silicon approach for high-bandwidth connections between Fujitsu processors and NVIDIA architecture. The project will draw on NVIDIA´s software stack, including NVIDIA CUDA-X libraries such as NVIDIA cuQuantum for quantum simulation, RAPIDS for data science, NVIDIA TensorRT for inference and NVIDIA NeMo for large language model development, alongside domain-specific software development kits tailored for science and industry. RIKEN, Fujitsu and NVIDIA plan coordinated software work on mixed-precision computing, continuous benchmarking and performance optimization.
The teams expect FugakuNEXT to serve a broad set of applications, from automating hypothesis generation, code creation and experiment simulation to accelerating scientific research with surrogate models and physics-informed neural networks. Target domains named in the announcement include earth systems modeling and disaster preparedness, drug discovery and advanced manufacturing, where AI-trained models can learn from simulations to speed and improve design. Backed by Japan´s MEXT, FugakuNEXT is positioned as a sovereign infrastructure to support universities, government agencies and industry partners nationwide and to showcase Japanese innovations that could become blueprints for the world.
