Fujitsu to make world's fastest supercomputer accessible to all via the cloud

Fujitsu is set to make its supercomputers available for businesses via the cloud, helping users access computing resources without the deployment or operational costs typically associated with the technology.

The company's new Computing as a Service (CaaS) portfolio will help accelerate digital transformation and empower customers globally by offering access to advanced computing technologies through the cloud for commercial use, Fujitsu claims.

As its first step, it will begin preorders for Fujitsu Cloud Service HPC, which offers the computing power of the Fujitsu Supercomputer PRIMEHPC FX1000. The company will first open up sales of the service to the general public and businesses in Japan starting 6 April, 2022, with delivery to commence from October, and a global rollout to follow after.

This means users can do-away with building their own HPC environments, allowing them to focus entirely on preparing data for analysis. Fujitsu says customers will only need to pay for what they need, although pricing information is not yet available.

The company will also help customers develop HPC utilisation plans tailored to their business plans and transfer their research results to the new platform. In the future, users planning large-scale analysis and research projects will be able to migrate to Fugaku, the world’s fastest supercomputer, with the same operability.

Until now, advanced computing technologies have been largely limited to applications in an academic context, due in part to prohibitively high investment costs and implementation and operational loads.

“CaaS will provide customers with seamless access to services on the public cloud to meet rapidly increasing computing demands, leveraging Fujitsu’s world-leading advanced computing technologies,” said Vivek Mahajan, chief technology officer at Fujitsu. “In the future, we look to further expand the portfolio with access to technologies like quantum computing.

“This move marks an important milestone toward democratising high-performance and quantum computing and will play an important role in the achievement of Fujitsu’s Purpose: ‘to make the world more sustainable by building trust in society through innovation.’”

The company anticipates that CaaS will contribute to solving persistent challenges in a range of industries, including finance, ​​manufacturing, distribution, logistics, disaster prevention (including earthquake and tsunami prediction), and medical fields such as drug discovery and gene therapy. Fujitsu's Fugaku supercomputer has already been deployed to power tsunami evacuations drills as part of a local trial in Japan.

It also hopes to support customers in managing, digitising, and integrating complex data in their business through secure 5G and beyond 5G networks, and provide advanced AI and quantum computing technologies for real time processing of digital data. The company plans to conduct trials with organisations and companies to optimise designs for the manufacturing industry, and drug discovery for pharmaceutical companies.

The Japanese company isn’t the only one in the region expanding its high performance computing offerings, as yesterday HPE built a new HPC cluster for the City University of Hong Kong to bolster its scientific research. The new cluster delivers 10 times faster speeds in HPC and AI applications compared to the old technology, and will be used to improve modelling and simulation across biomedicine and social science.