Fujitsu is launching Computing-as-a-Service (CaaS), a new suite of services aimed at commercialising some of its advanced computing tech.
The first package on offer is Fujitsu Cloud Service HPC, enabling cloud-based access to PRIMEHPC FX1000 machines, built with the same proprietary A64FX processors that power Fugaku.
Fujitsu hopes that CaaS will find potential applications in a wide range of industries, including finance, manufacturing, distribution, logistics, disaster prevention, drug discovery, and gene therapy.
Fujitsu-built Fugaku (originally codenamed ‘Post-K’) has remained the world’s most powerful supercomputer since June 2020. The current iteration of the machine uses 7,630,848 Arm cores and the Tofu interconnect to deliver almost three times more performance than its nearest competitor, IBM-built Summit, which is housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
As part of CaaS, the company is bundling the tools developed to run practical workloads on Fugaku, including a job scheduler, file system, compiler, application software, and APIs. Besides PRIMEHPC FX1000 systems, CaaS will eventually offer access to Fujitsu’s machine learning platforms and its quantum-inspired Digital Annealing Units (DAUs). These chips are designed to emulate qubits, the basic units of quantum computing, in a digital circuit.
