Rescale has signed a partnership agreement with Japan’s Riken research institute to operate the world's most powerful supercomputer* on the cloud.

The partnership will mean that the 442 petaflops Fugaku will be available on the cloud for commercial uses.

Rescale, which develops cloud software for high performance computing platforms, is partnering with research institute Riken as part of the Fugaku Cloud Platform program.

That project includes nine other commercial cloud service platform providers that will use Fugaku and as an Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) backend.

Among the other companies are Fujitsu, Altair Engineering, HPC Systems, HPC Solutions, Exa Corporation, Xtreme-D, Vinas Co, and Nimbix.

In November, Oracle announced that Fugaku was using its cloud platform for elastic HPC storage and to help researchers connect to the systems.

On Twitter, Riken director Satoshi Matsuoka said that the supercomputer will specialize on batch-like high-end HPC workloads, but at the same time the group plans "to actively offload the peripheral services to the commercial Clouds, and the users will not be able to tell the difference. This is the beauty of the Cloud, we get to focus on our expertise."

*While Fugaku is the world's most powerful supercomputer according to the bi-annual Top500 list, China is believed to be secretly operating two exascale supercomputers.