Japan to build super-efficient computer
26 Nov 2016
Japan intends to build a super-efficient computer to power it to the top of world's supercomputer rankings by the end of next year.
The supercomputer would have a processing capacity of 130 petaflops and outperform the current world leader, China's Sunway TaihuLight, which delivers 93 petaflops. A petaflop represents one million billion floating-point operations per second.
Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) would not only build the world's fastest supercomputers, it also wanted to make it one of the most efficient and aimed for a power consumption of under 3 megawatts.
According to commentators, this is a highly ambitious target given that Japan's current highest entry in the Top500 supercomputer list, Oakforest-PACS, delivered one-tenth the performance (13.6 petaflops) for the same power. TaihuLight consumed over 15 MW.
AIST also aims for power usage effectiveness (the ratio of total power consumption, including that required for cooling, to power consumed by computing devices) of under 1.1, a value attained only by the world's most efficient data centres.
The institute also planned to use liquid cooling, which was also being used by French company Atos in its supercomputer design for the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA).
"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, where the computer will be built, Reuters reported.
According to commentators, the push to reclaim its technological domination comes at a time when Japan's technologicl prowess had taken a beating after it was overtaken by China as the world's second-biggest economy.
