Japan's Fugaku supercomputer is tackling some of the world's biggest problems

Instead, it was born with an "application-first philosophy," meaning that its exclusive purpose is to dedicate its computational excellence to tackling some of the world's biggest challenges, such as climate change, says Satoshi Matsuoka, 57, the mastermind behind the project. "Benchmark excellence is not our priority," he said in an interview conducted in fluent, near flawless English. Instead, he said, its success is assessed "based on how much we can accelerate the applications that are important in society." As the director of Riken's Center for Computational Science, Matsuoka and his team have set out nine application areas for Fugaku to work on that are of importance to society, such as medicine, pharmacology, disaster prediction and prevention, environmental sustainability and energy. Matsuoka began leading the team developing the next-generation supercomputer in around 2010, just before its predecessor K computer became the world's fastest supercomputer in the Top500 benchmark by conducting more than 10 quadrillion calculations per second.