China’s Sunway TaihuLight is currently the world leader. However, Japan plans to create a super-efficient, super-fast computer with a processing power of 130 petaflops. This compares to the 93 petaflops Sunway TaihuLight has. One petaflop equals one million billion floating point operations per second.
Japan will deliver a tenfold rise in computing performance for the same amount of power consumption, which will likely bring booming popularity and a new level of computing power to its supercomputer. This grandiose event is expected in 2017.
Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (abbreviated AIST) aims to not only build supercomputers but also leave behind all the machines in the world. It also wants to improve its effectiveness. How can you achieve a power consumption of less than 3 megawatts? If you put your hand on the wheel, everything is possible. Let’s pretend for a moment that Japan’s current top entry in the Top500 supercomputer lists, Oakforest-PACS delivers only one-tenth of the performance (13.6 petaflops), for the same power. It becomes apparent that the next goal is almost impossible and overwhelming.
TaihuLight uses more than 15 MW.
AIST also aims to achieve a power usage efficiency (the ratio between total power consumption and power consumed by computing devices) below 1.1. This PUE value is only possible at the most powerful data centers in the world.
AIST has its trumpcard – liquid cooling. This method is also used by French company Atos for its supercomputer design for French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commissions (CEA). Atos is striving for one exaflop (one trillion billion flops). However, its computer won’t be ready for use until 2020. AIST however expects that its “child” will be born in a year.
Other countries tend not to optimize their supercomputers for calculations such a nuclear weapon simulations or atmospheric modeling. What is AIST doing in the meantime? It targets machine learning and deep-learning applications in the rapidly growing field of artificial Intelligence (AI) using the new computer design.
The project is called AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI) and is intended for startups, industrial supercomputing users, academia, and others in accordance with AIST’s document.
The University of Tokyo’s Kashiwa campus, located around 40 km northeast of Tokyo, will house ABCI, the fastest computer on the planet.
