Japan’s Supercomputer Can Now Beat Up China’s Supercomputer
“It uses at 9.9 megawatts of power, running up an electricity bill of about $10m a year — that’s enough electricity to power about 10,000 homes a year.” It boasts a processing speed of 8.16 petaflops, which translates into 8.16 quadrillion operations per second. Wow, that is a LOT of inaccurate weather pattern forecasts. Still, the K, as it is known, is now the fastest supercomputer on the planet. In fact, it is three times faster than the Chinese Tianhe-1A, which had been the most powerful computer on the planet for the last seven years. The K is a collaborative effort between technology giant Fujitsu and a Japanese government-funded research think tank called Riken. And in an ironic twist, K’s development was hindered just a bit by the Marth 11th disaster in Japan, where the machine with the computing power equivalent of one million desktop PCs will be used to create models to predict the impact of earthquakes and tsunamis. Pretty noble goals for this very powerful computer. Still, we can’t help but wonder if some little part of this computing monster is being used as a server for multi-player games of Left 4 Dead 2 (The Guardian UK – Japan’s New Supercomputer)