Japan Wants to Build 10 Petaflop Supercomputer 353
deepexplorer writes "Japan wants to gain the fastest supercomputer spot back. Japan wants to develop a supercomputer that can operate at 10 petaflops, or 10 quadrillion calculations per second, which is 73 times faster than the
Blue Gene. Current fastest supercomputer is the partially finished Blue Gene is capable of 136.8 teraflops and the target when finished is 360 teraflops."
Overclock (Score:2, Insightful)
I only have to overclock my Pentium 4 83000 times to beat that little pocket calculator.
(Pentium 4 3.06 GHz has a theoretical max of 12 Gigaflops)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Columbia (Score:5, Insightful)
They keep saying BlueGene/L when it's not even completed (maybe it finally is). There's also
The fastest operational (like anything else matters) supercomputer is Columbia at NASA. And guess what? It's doing a ton of usefull work, like helping make sure the Space Shuttle launches without a hitch by computing all the Thermal Protection System problems and various other analyses.
Look at the number of processors it uses and it's performance compared to the others. It's one of the more efficient of the bunch.
Just wait until they upgrade it..
Top500 should include different rankings, like efficiency or measurable areas other than projected TFlops. In the end it's not how many you got, but how well you can use them.
Re:Its a government makework project (Score:3, Insightful)
I live in a prefecture which is Japan's answer to rural Iowa
Hmmm... Kumamoto? Aomori? Hokkaido? Enquiring minds want to know what part of Japan is their answer to rural Iowa...
Not that I should talk, I'm from Kagoshima. It's not so different from the American deep south, really, including rebellions.
As for the supercomputers, like I said, at least a lot of the stuff that gets pork-barreled in Japan can be useful, unlike here in the US where we spend it in ways that don't benefit society at all. My city just spent millions of tax dollars building a new stadium for our NBA team, when we already have one that just opened in the 90s but turned out to be a boondoggle, and we have an even older stadium that's still usable. But the NBA team controls the old stadium, and doesn't want competition, so we'll probobly end up tearing down the multi-million dollar stadium we built in the 90s. *sigh* I wish they'd just bought a supercomputer instead.
I suspect this supercomputer thing is a combination of politicians who don't really understand what they're useful for but know "we gotta keep up with the Americans/Euros/Chinese", and a excercise in national competition and good old industry pork. Just like NASA over here. I'm suprised Japan isn't spending more on their space program, especially with China and North Korea advancing in the field... how was the Japanese reaction to the Chinese manned mission, btw? Any serious calls for a Japanese one yet?