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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: Japan supercomputer K beats rivals K – meaning 10 quadrillion – harnesses more power than the next five supercomputers combined After the indignity of seeing its economy overtaken by China's earlier this year, Japan has clawed back a little pride, beating its east Asian rival to produce the world's most powerful computer for the first time in seven years. The machine, nicknamed K – a play on the Japanese word kei, meaning 10 quadrillion, the number of operations per second it is designed to perform when it is completed next year – crushed the opposition when the latest rankings were announced at the International Supercomputing conference at Hamburg. It harnesses more power than the next five supercomputers combined, and is mush faster than its closest rival, designed by China's National University of Defence Technology. About 1m desktop computers would have to be linked up to replicate its performance. The K, a collaborative effort involving Fujitsu and Riken, a government-funded research institute, boasts a current speed of 8.16 petaflops – or 8.16 quadrillion operations a second – making it three times faster than China's most powerful machine, the Tianhe-1A, which had topped the rankings since last November. Development of the K was slowed by the natural disaster that struck Japan's north-east coast in March; appropriately enough, when fully functional the supercomputer will be put to use predicting the possible impact of earthquakes and tsunamis. It will also have economic uses in the fields of drugs, new technology and renewable energy, and could be used to improve our understanding of climate change. "We must realise that science and technology is an area in which Japan can show its strength," Riken's president, Ryoji Noyori, told reporters. While Japan's resurgence should have scientists dancing in laboratory corridors, not everyone is convinced that resources should be poured into fueling the country's supercomputer rivalry with the US and, increasingly, China. Funding for the project, estimated at 112bn yen, was almost cut in 2009 when a government panel questioned the investment required in the midst of an economic crisis. Renho, now the government minister in charge of cutting wasteful spending, infuriated scientists when she asked: "What's wrong with being number two?" Its future was secured after a group of Nobel prize winners convinced the prime minister at the time, Yukio Hatoyama, that Japan should not settle for second best. Asked to comment on this week's success, Renho said: "That's good news. I want to salute the people involved." The K computer, with more than 68,544 processors, occupies 672 cabinets at Riken's Advanced Institute for Computational Science in the western port city of Kobe. It uses at 9.9 megawatts of power, running up an electricity bill of about $10m (£6.16m) a year — that's enough electricity to power about 10,000 homes a year. It is more than 200 times faster than the Earth Simulator, a joint project involving NEC and the Japan Agency for Marine-earth Science and Technology, the last Japanese supercomputer to top the global league table, in 2004. Japan's celebrations may not last for long, however. The US technology firm IBM is working on a system at Illinois University that will be able to process more than 10 quadrillion calculations per second. From among comments: WillWansleigh Previous poster enricosiles has it right. Linux software suites are cycling through this electronic beast. This saves the Japanese from having to pay a licence fee to Microsoft as they don't use any MS Windows products. Linux operating systems and applications software are growing by the day and shall soon pass Microsoft. Several major players in the computer industry have selected Ubuntu (A Linux operating system) which is free on the Internet. Raymond Kurzweil has written extensively about Singularity which shall involve the convergence of machines and software into mental cognitive equality with humans in about 30 years. This achievement shall come about with such systems as the "K" computer by Fujitsu and Rikens. We humans shall have to deal with these systems as they attain the same level of cognitive processing as us. Perhaps these computer systems will declare we humans as "redundant" or a drain on global resources and start a mass extermination of the human species. Whom would have thought that computers which switch voltages using the '1 and 0' binary language could develop into our equals in 30 years time? With several companies developing "photonic switching" these voltages will be replaced with the medium of light. The future is bright with the speed of processing growing exponentially. It's how we humans harness this powerful tool that shall define our futures. earlgray @WillWansleigh Linux is for people with a lot of time on their hands, like researchers who like or need to modify kernal code to fit new hardware. For single users its still a major pain in the ass to use. I'm no fan of Microsoft but their software works, most of the time, and the OS supports the latest development languages and applications. What we really need is a revolutionary new OS/hardware design which breaks away from this constricted Neumann architecture. typingfromwork "What's wrong with being number two?" Said the tortoise to the hare.
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#1. To: Tatarewicz (#0)
Dang, that's a BIG number. ;)
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one." Edmund Burke
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