APPLICATIONS

The Japanese news agency Nikkei reports the Japanese government research institute Riken has appointed Hitachi, NEC and Fujitsu to jointly develop the world's fastest supercomputer by March 2009. The institute reported the names of companies as the co-developers of Japan's next-generation supercomputer to the education ministry, an NEC spokesman said. Japan's Science and Technology ministry has budgeted 115.4 billion yen ($948.08 million dollars) to build it. The three companies are to design the supercomputer to be able to compute at 10 petaflops, according to the report. The report predicts that the next-generation supercomputer's architecture will be a multi-system combining an accelerator-embedded scalar supercomputer and a vector supercomputer. Japan aims to regain the title as the owner of the world's fastest supercomputer after the U.S. snatched it in 2004. In 2004, the NEC-made Earth Simulator was overtaken as the world's fastest supercomputer by the IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer system. On the current Top500 List, the IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer system, installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is the No. 1 supercomputer with a Linpack performance of 280.6 teraflop/s (trillions of calculations per second, or Tflop/s). The new supercomputer, which would be installed at a facility in western Japanese city of Kobe, is expected to serve mainly academic and corporate researchers in research fields such as nanotechnology and life science. The new Top500 List will be unveiled at the 2007 International Supercomputing Conference (ISC '07), which will take place in Dresden, Germany from June 26th to 29th.