Japan is a country known to be the most advanced in terms of technology. The focus of science and technology in Japan are electronics, robotics and the automotive industry. Examples of their very owned technology made ae the robotic hotels and typhoon-powered wind turbines. And now, Japan officials are planning to make a supercomputer that will be the fastest of its kind in the whole world.
Supercomputer, The Fastest Of Its Kind In The World
A supercomputer is a computer with a high-level computational capacity compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). As of June 2016, the fastest supercomputer in the world is the Sunway TaihuLight, in mainland China, with a Linpack benchmark of 93 PFLOPS, exceeding the previous record holder, Tianhe-2, by around 59 PFLOPS.
Japans Plans To Make A Supercomputer
According to Gizmodo, officials in Japan have announced a plan to build the world’s fastest supercomputer in a bid to reaffirm the country’s place as a leader in technological advancement. If all goes according to plan, the processing monster will cost 19.5 billion yen ($173 million) and will be cable of 130 quadrillion calculations per second, Reuters reports.
Sources involved in the project told Reuters that engineers plan to build a machine that could make 130 quadrillion calculations per second or 130 petaflops in scientific term, next year. Japan's computer, with this speed, could beat China's Sunway Taihulight that is capable of 93 petaflops.
"As far as we know, there is nothing out there that is as fast," said Satoshi Sekiguchi, a director general at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.
Japan has asked various companies to bid for the honor of actually building the machine, codenamed ABCI (AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure). The winner will be announced after December 8th, and will expected to come online in 2018, according to Engadget.
