April-May - Volume 1, Issue 3

The Fastest Supercomputer

A Japanese laboratory has built the world's fastest computer, one with the computing power of the 20 fastest US computers combined.

The computer is nearly five times faster than the previous leader, a machine built by IBM, according to Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains an authoritative list of the world's fastest computers.

The Japanese government spent $350m to $400m ( Birr 3,031m to Birr 3,466m) to develop the supercomputer over the past five years, said Akira Sekino, president and chief executive of HNSX Supercomputers, a unit of NEC of Littleton, Colorado.
The computer, which is known as the NEC Earth Simulator, was intended to analyse climate changes, including global warming, as well as weather and earthquake patterns.

Dongarra said the Earth Simulator had 5,104 processors and could reach a speed of 35,600 gigaflops, or billions of mathematical operations per second. The old supercomputer speed record was held by the ASCI White-Pacific computer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Its 7,424 processors generate a speed of 7,226 gigaflops a second.
The Earth Simulator was formally dedicated in March, and had been installed at the Earth Simulator Research and Development Center in Yokohama, west of Tokyo. The Japan Marine Science and Technology Center said on Friday the computer had reached more than 87 percent of its theoretical peak speed.