For some months now, we have seen how the list of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet has changed a lot, so much so that the most powerful machines are no longer located in the United States, but it has been China that has managed to occupy the first graces to the development and construction of monsters like Sunway TaihuLight, considered today as the world's fastest and most powerful supercomputer.
Now, just after knowing months ago that the United States was going to work to create a machine capable of winning the first place, comes the Japanese initiative where, as has been commented from the country's Ministry of Economy and Industry, Japan will invest 173 million in the development of a new supercomputer with one main objective, that it be a research platform capable of giving a great boost to the development of technologies such as those present in autonomous vehicles, medicine or artificial intelligence.
Japan will invest $ 173 million in the development of a new supercomputer that is expected to be completed by the end of 2017.
As you are surely thinking, this investment is not only intended to help in the development of certain technologies that are considered by many governments as indispensable in the not too distant future, hence they fight for their companies to be considered as benchmarks, but also will be used so that this new supercomputer is considered, in turn, as the most powerful and fastest on the planet.
Putting the latter in perspective, it should be noted that for example the two most powerful supercomputers created to date, the Sunway TaihuLight and the Titan Gray XK7, have a power of 93,1 petaflops and 17,59 petaflops respectively. In the machine that is being worked on today in Japan, baptized as AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure, you want to achieve 130 petaflops.
Further information: Reuters