Japan is about to spend $173 million to build the world's fastest supercomputer. The country targets to defeat other existing supercomputers with its planned feature of 130 quadrillion calculations per second.
To build the world's fastest supercomputer is what Japan plans to do in a bid to help the country's progress in technological advancements. The supercomputer is expected to help manufacturers of the country in its research and development in improving self-driving cars, robotics and medical diagnostics.
According to Reuters, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry plans to spend 19.5 billion yen or $173 million to bring back Japan as the leading country in technology by building the supercomputer. Japanese engineers are tasked to build a machine that can do 130 quadrillion calculations per second or 130 petaflops, which targets the production next year.
Currently, China's National Supercomputing Center's Sunway TaihuLight with 93 petaflops owns the number one spot of world's most powerful supercomputer. Second to its place is China's Tianhe-2 with 34 petaflops and the third is the United States' Titan Cray XK7 with 24 petaflops. Japan's attempt of creating a supercomputer with 130 petaflops will be a big leap to technology advancements.
Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, director general Satoshi Sekiguchi said, "as far as we know, there is nothing out there that is as fast." He believes that Japan can surpass its current sixth place at the recent 48th Top500 list of fastest supercomputers.
According to InsideHPC, Fujitsu's Oakforest-PACS and K supercomputer placed Japan at the number six spot in the world with 13.55 petaflops. The Fujitsu supercomputer is built with PRIMERGY CX600 M1 x86 servers and uses Intel Xeon Phi processors in its 8,208 computation nodes.
Meanwhile, Japan's main target is to use the technology of the supercomputer to its advancements in Artificial Intelligence like one of use by Google's DeepMind. Supercomputers can also be applied to help improve companies with its automation like producing a self-driving car and other manufacturing business.
