The International Supercomputing Conference is taking place in Hamburg/Germany at the moment – reason enough for the Top500 committee to update their list of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers today. And it turns out that Japan, via Fujitsu’s so-called “K”, is the new No. 1 on that list.
“K” consists of 672 computer racks that boast a total of 68,544 CPUs and handles 8.162 petaflop/s (quadrillion floating-point operations per second). The computer destroys the former top of the list (and the new No. 2), the Tianhe-1A supercomputer at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China (that computer “only” achieves 2.6 petaflop/s).
The last time a Japanese supercomputer topped the list was in 2004 (the “Earth Simulator”). “K” is expected to hit 10 petaflop/s next year. The Fujitsu supercomputer is located at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe.