Japan was once the at the forefront of technological innovation both for ordinary consumers as in various industries like computing. In recent times, it has fallen behind other countries like China which currently own’s the fastest supercomputer in the world. However, Japan is hoping for a tech revival by building a superefficient supercomputer in 2017.
By building the world’s fastest supercomputer, Japan is hoping to help the country’s various manufacturers by providing a platform used to develop new technology and improve the current state of medical diagnostics, advance the field of robotics as well enhance driverless cars. Additionally, developing such a supercomputer would bring renown back to the once technologically-famed country.
Currently, China’s Sunway TaihuLight is the best supercomputer, capable of delivering 93 petaflops at an energy consumption of over 15 megawatts. One petaflop is equal to one million billion floating-point calculations per second.
In order to top the TaihuLight, the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry will invest $173 million in Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). Scientists are planning to build the supercomputer with a processing power of 130 petaflops by the end of 2017. Besides being 50 percent more powerful than China’s computer, AIST hopes to build the computer to be as energy efficient as possible.
Researchers are developing technologies that would bring the power consumption to under 3 megawatts. This would be extremely impressive and it would be ten times more energy efficient than Japan’s current computer, the Oakforest-PACS.
What sets Japan’s goal in regards to a supercomputer apart from other countries, is that they plan to optimize it for deep learning as well as various other AI applications. This unlike the goals of other countries who mainly use theirs from calculations in regards to atmospheric modeling or simulations of nuclear weapons.
The upcoming supercomputer will be called ABCI, short of AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure and it will be made available for a fee to Japanese corporations and startup companies for a certain fee after it’s completed. Currently, only the bidding phase for the project has begun and it’s scheduled to close on December 8th.
What do you think about Japan newest technological endeavor?
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