Japan plans to build 130 petaflop supercomputer

By admin On Nov 25, 2016

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Japan has announced plans to build a supercomputer with a theoretical speed of 130 petaflops. This would be higher than the theoretical speed of the Chinese Sunway-TaihuLight of 125 petaflops. This system is currently number one.

It’s unclear whether the system will actually top the list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers upon delivery. Reuters news agency writes based on sources that construction of the system should start sometime in 2017 at the earliest. At the moment, the Chinese counterpart is still the most powerful variant with an actual speed of 93 petaflops, but the developments in the field of supercomputers follow each other quickly. For example, China recently announced the construction of a system that should reach between 930 petaflops and 1 exaflop.

According to Reuters, approximately 19.5 billion yen is involved in the construction of the Japanese system, which translates into 162.5 million euros. Japan would like to use the computing power of such a system for research into artificial intelligence, in addition to developing self-driving cars and analyzing medical data. The name of the new Japanese system is ‘AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure’, or ABCI. The Chinese TaihuLight is used for weather forecasting, pharmaceutical research and industrial design, among other things.

Currently, the most powerful supercomputer in Japan is in use at the Joint Center for Advanced High Performance Computing, which was founded in 2013 by two universities. That system, the Oakforest-PACS, is capable of a theoretical speed of about 25 petaflops and is built by the Japanese Fujitsu.

Earlier this year, the European Union announced its intention to have two prototype supercomputers ready by 2020, one of which should be in the top three in the world. In doing so, the EU wants to catch up in the HPC area. The most efficient supercomputer was recently built by Nvidia and bears the name SaturnV. This is good for a theoretical speed of 4.9 petaflops, which in practice amounts to 3.3 petaflops.