News, Computing

Japan Is Set To Build World’s Fastest Supercomputer, Invests $173 Million

485899 tianhe 2 supercomputer

Supercomputer plays an important role especially when there is a talk on computational science. Supercomputers help in solving complex problems in molecular, quantum mechanics, biomedicine, weather forecasting and aerospace design.

Not much that, they can also be used to simulate nuclear weapon explosions and develop new stealth technology. Since supercomputers are so useful, most of the countries in the world are trying to create the fastest supercomputer.

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Currently, China’s Sunway TaihuLight with a peak speed of 93.01 PFLOPS (in detail below) is the fastest computer in the world. However, it might not be the same if Japan pulls off the fastest supercomputer to reinstate itself as a technological leader in the world.

What is PFLOPS? List Of World’s Fastest Supercomputers.

Well, this is not common among the computers we use daily (obviously, isn’t supercomputer?). Petaflops is a unit of measurement used for measuring the performance of a processor’s floating point unit, or FPU. It may also be written “petaFLOPS” or “PFLOPS”.


Since FLOPS stands for “Floating Point Operations Per Second” the term “petaflops” may be either singular (one petaflop) or plural (two or more petaflops). One petaflops is equal to 1,000 teraflops, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 FLOPS. Basically, petaflops are more often used when calculating the processing power of multiple computers.

Here is the list of supercomputers 2016;

Supercomputer

So, Japan’s Supercomputer?

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan is planning to invest 19.5 billion yen (approximately $173 million) on the supercomputer project. According to the expected plan, the Japanese are going to build a machine that has a computational speed of 130 petaflops (China has 93.01 petaflops, which is the fastest in the world currently) and in other words, it will be making 130 quadrillion calculations per second.

Satoshi Sekiguchi, Director General of National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology said:

As far as we know, there is nothing out there that is as fast.


AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI)

The Japanese supercomputer will be called AI Bridging Cloud or ABCI. Japan plans to make advances in the ‘deep learning’ AI technology. Deep learning uses artificial neural networks that are multilayered to evaluate huge amounts of data and perform several tasks.

Supercomputer

ABCI will give stiff competition to other deep learning systems such as AlphaGO, a DeepMind AI program from Google.  Japanese organizations will be able to use this supercomputer for a fee so that they no longer have to use foreign companies like Microsoft and Google for their data crunching.

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Various technological firms in Japan have already bid for this project, and the bidding is going to continue till 8th December. Even Fujitsu Ltd, the builder of the fastest supercomputer in Japan till date, has expressed its interest in this supercomputer project.

Will this happen? Well, we have to wait for the next year to come.


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