Photo/Illutration The latest supercomputer, ABCI 3.0, designed to develop AI, starts its operation. The photo was taken in the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology Kashiwa in Chiba Prefecture on Jan. 20. (Takahiro Takenouchi)

ABCI 3.0, the most advanced public supercomputer in Japan specializing in the research and development of artificial intelligence, began full-scale operation on Jan. 20.

The supercomputer was installed at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) Kashiwa campus in Kashiwa, Chiba Prefecture, and shown to the media on the same day.

The government invested about 36 billion yen ($232 million) into the supercomputer, which is equipped with a large number of GPUs, semiconductors that can speed up AI calculations.

It has the greatest computing capacity of any public supercomputer in the nation, and will be used by universities, research institutes and startups.

“We hope that not only major U.S. companies will take on the challenge of advanced AI, but that Japanese companies and universities can do so too by utilizing ABCI 3.0,” said Hirotaka Ogawa, who is responsible for operations of the ABCI 3.0 at AIST.

The ABCI 3.0 device is 21 meters long, 19 meters wide and 6 meters tall.

It can perform 6.2 quintillion computations per second using AI calculation methods. It is said to have about three times the AI calculation performance of the supercomputer Fugaku, which was developed by the Riken research institute.

The ABCI 3.0’s GPUs, which are in high demand, were procured from the U.S. semiconductor giant Nvidia Corp.

AIST plans to use ABCI 3.0 to develop “multimodal generative AI,” which can combine multiple formats such as image, text, sound and measurements of the size and distance of 3-D objects.

The institute will also use ABCI 3.0 to integrate multimodal generative AI with robots.

AIST started running ABCI 1.0 in 2018 to “make it easier for companies and universities to take on the challenge of AI development.”

In 2021, AIST put ABCI 2.0 into operation with enhanced GPUs and other upgraded features. Companies and universities took advantage of ABCI 2.0 to develop advanced AI, such as the Large Language Models used in ChatGPT.

With international competition in AI development taking off, ABCI 2.0’s computing capacity was nearly fully utilized.

ABCI 3.0, which features completely redesigned GPUs and other upgrades, has seven times the AI computing capacity of the 2.0 version.

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