Supercomputer Shatters Speed Mark
A Japanese laboratory has built the world's fastest supercomputer, one with the computing power of the 20 fastest U.S. computers combined, The New York Times reported on Saturday.
The computer is nearly five times faster than the previous leader, a machine built by IBM, according to Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains an authoritative list of the world's fastest computers, the Times said.
The Japanese government spent $350 million to $400 million to develop the supercomputer over the past five years, Akira Sekino, president and chief executive of HNSX Supercomputers, a unit of NEC Corp. of Littleton, Colorado, told the newspaper.
The computer, which is known as the NEC Earth Simulator, was intended to analyze climate changes, including global warming, as well as weather and earthquake patterns, the Times said.
Dongarra said the Earth Simulator had 5,104 processors and could reach a speed of 35,600 gigaflops, or billions of mathematical operations per second.
The old supercomputer speed record, he said, was held by the ASCI White-Pacific computer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Its 7,424 processors generate a speed of 7,226 gigaflops a second.
The Earth Simulator was formally dedicated in March, and had been installed at the Earth Simulator Research and Development Center in Yokohama, west of Tokyo, the Times said. The Japan Marine Science and Technology Center said on Friday the computer had reached more than 87 percent of its theoretical peak speed, the newspaper said.
The achievement is evidence that a technology race that most American engineers thought they were winning handily is far from over. American companies have built the fastest computers for most of the last decade, the Times explains.
The accomplishment is also a vivid statement of contrasting scientific and technology priorities in the United States and Japan, the Times says. The Japanese machine was built to analyze climate change, including global warming, as well as weather and earthquake patterns. By contrast, the United States has predominantly focused its efforts on building powerful computers for simulating weapons, while its efforts have lagged in scientific areas such as climate modeling.
For some American computer scientists, the arrival of the Japanese supercomputer evokes the type of alarm raised by the Soviet Union's Sputnik satellite in 1957, the Times reports. "In some sense we have a Computenik on our hands," said Dongarra.
Several United States computer scientists told the Times the Japanese machine reflected differences in style and commitment that suggest that United States research and spending efforts have grown complacent in recent years.
"The Japanese clearly have a level of will that we haven't achieved," said Thomas Sterling, a supercomputer designer at the California Institute of Technology. "These guys are blowing us out of the water, and we need to sit up and take notice," the Times quotes him as saying.
Advances in computer speed today routinely extend computer simulation into all areas of science and engineering as complex calculations take an increasingly shorter time. Because increases in computing power tend to have exponential results, a problem that could take years for even the fastest computers today might be finished in hours on the new Japanese computer, the Times adds.