The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in collaboration with the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, is partnering with UK-based Codeplay Software to enhance GPU compiler capabilities for NVIDIA. This collaboration will help NERSC and ALCF users, along with researchers in the high-performance computing community, to produce high-performance applications that are portable across compute architectures from multiple vendors. Today, most artificial intelligence software, including for cars, is developed using graphics processors designed for video games, according to Codeplay. The company provides tools designed to enable software to be accelerated by graphics processors or the latest specialized AI processors. NERSC supercomputers are used for scientific research by researchers working in diverse areas such as alternative energy, environment, high-energy and nuclear physics, advanced computing, materials science and chemistry.

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.