Japan plans the most powerful supercomputer: 130 PFLOPs
Ambitious target for the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry Japan: to build by 2017 a supercomputer able to bring Japan at the center of technological development.
And the intention of the Japanese government to build the most powerful supercomputer available in the market, thanks to an investment estimated at 19.5 billion yen (about 173 million US dollars). A figure of this type will allow you to configure a system able to reach a target of a maximum processing power of up to 130 PetaFLOPS, consequently becoming the most powerful supercomputer in the world.
This installation has assumed the name of ABCI, AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure, but little is known about how this solution will be configured from the hardware point of view. And granted expect the use of accelerators of some kind, optimized for the development of artificial intelligence fields that are mentioned by the name of the supercomputer.
This leads naturally to hypothesize the use of the GPU inside the computational structure, suited to this type of processing, which often required accuracies 8bit and 16bit. On the other hand, it is possible that an installation of this type can also be used for different tasks, for which a high power of floating point processing with precision 32bit or 64bit is more suitable.
For the moment, according to reports from Reuters, lacking further information if not the intention of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry Japan to bring more and more Japan at the center of technological development.
This investment is thus intended among other things to bring Japan into a position it held in the past and he has seen in recent years other nations advance. No surprise then to see how the present moment the most powerful supercomputer in the world is the Chinese solution Sunway Taihulight, capable of about 93 petaflops.
Companies interested in participating in this initiative are invited to submit their proposals by 8 December; in the weeks, following it is conceivable that the buyers will announce the operational plans, providing more details on this installation whose completion is scheduled on the card within the next year.
