INDUSTRY

A partnership between government and industry may see Japan break the PetaFlops barrier to claim the top spot in the supercomputing league in 2011. Japan is aiming to develop a supercomputer it hopes will be fast enough to help it regain the top spot it lost to US makers last year in an industry that is often seen as a proxy fight for technological supremacy. The government wants to develop a supercomputer that can handle over a quadrillion (a thousand trillion) calculations per second as early as the fiscal year ending in March 2011, an official at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology said today. The government wants to develop a supercomputer that can handle over a quadrillion (a thousand trillion) calculations per second as early as the fiscal year ending in March 2011, an official at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology said today. That would compare with the 135.5 trillion calculations per second in independent tests earlier this year for IBM's Blue Gene/L, currently the world's fastest computer, built for the US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Agency. Japan's fastest machine currently is NEC's Earth Simulator, which boasts nearly 36 trillion calculations per second. It had been the world's fastest supercomputer until last year, when it was overtaken by IBM's Blue Gene/L. Japan's new supercomputer would enable medical researchers to conduct comprehensive simulations on how a medicine is dissolved and carried through a human body and how it affects a specific organ, for example, the ministry official said. It would also help provide weather forecasts with improved accuracy, the official said. NEC, Hitachi, the University of Tokyo and Kyushu University were chosen by the ministry earlier this month to develop critical technologies to make the ultra-fast computer possible. Details such as how much total investment will be needed for the project and which organisations will be involved in the actual development has yet to be decided.