Japan took the top spot from China in the ranking for the world’s fastest supercomputer back in June, when the International Supercomputing Conference said “K”, a supercomputer made by Fujitsu, is outperforming China’s Tianhe-1A. In August, the Japanese government said it is ready to pump another US$1.3 billion into supercomputer development, and today, K is faster than ever.
As announced by Fujitsu, K is now the first computer in the world being able to handle over 10 quadrillion calculations per second, or 10 petaflops. To be more concrete, K’s 88,128 CPUs (arrayed over 864 racks) ran continuously for almost 30 hours, achieving a performance of 10.51 petaflops (benchmark in June: 8.162 petaflops).
According to Fujitsu and its other maker, Japanese government agency RIKEN, this performance translates to an execution efficiency of 93.2%, a number that’s higher than that of other supercomputers, too (benchmark in June: 93.0%).
K is expected to help the government predict earthquakes and other natural disasters, analyze climate change, develop new drugs, explore outer space, etc. Fujitsu and Riken plan to put it to practical use in November 2012.