Japan Plans World's Fastest Computer

TOKYO (AP) -- Japan has plans to start building a supercomputer next year that can operate 73 times faster than the world's fastest supercomputer, the government said Monday.

The American Blue Gene/L system supercomputer developed by International Business Machines Corp. at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, currently holds the title of the world's fastest. That machine is capable of 136.8 teraflops, or 136.8 trillion calculations per second, according to Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

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, an official of the ministry said on condition of anonymity.

Kyodo News reported that the total amount for the project is estimated between 80 billion and 100 billion yen (US$714 million to 893 million; euro593 million to 741 million) and the ministry will request 10 billion yen (US$89 million; euro74 million) for the next fiscal year's budget.

The ministry official could not confirm the figures, saying it has yet to reach a formal decision on the project, which is expected by the end of August.

But he said that if the budget for next year is approved, the ministry hopes to complete the next-generation supercomputer sometime in fiscal 2010, which ends in March 2011.

Japan's Earth Simulator supercomputer, introduced in 2002, had been the world's fastest until 2004, when the IBM's Blue Gene took the title, he said.

Currently, the Earth Simulator, at a speed of 35.9 teraflops, is ranked fourth after the IBM's two Blue Gene systems and NASA's Columbia system, all in the United States, according to the top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers, released at the International Supercomputing Conference held in June in Heidelberg, Germany.

The Earth Simulator is used to track global sea temperatures, rainfall and crustal movement to predict natural disasters over the next few centuries.

The ministry wants to use the planned supercomputer for a wider use such as simulating the formation of galaxy and the interactions between a medicine and the human body.

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