Japanese Supercomputer, K Computer by Fujitsu grabbed title of World's Best-Performing Machine

A Japanese supercomputer, K Computer built by Fujitsu Co. grabbed the title of world's best-performing machine thereby returning Japan to the top of the computer arms race for the first time in seven years. Installed at Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, K Computer is also known as Riken. Japan last held the top spot in 2004, with NEC Corp.'s Earth Simulator.

The Japanese government-funded K Computer performs more than eight quadrillion (8,000 trillion) calculations per second. K Computer is a play on the Japanese word kei for the number 10 quadrillion, which will be the number of calculations the machine is targeted to handle once it is completed in 2012.

The Japanese machine is a major step up from existing supercomputers. It is more powerful than the next five fastest computer systems combined. According to the Top500, a compilation of the 500 most powerful computer systems in the world, determined by a group of academic and government researchers, Riken can perform three times as many calculations per second as the No. 2 supercomputer, designed by China's National University of Defense Technology.

The Japanese government invested more than 100 billion yen ($1.25 billion) in the K Computer project and aims to position Japan among the leaders for supercomputers, which can be used to tackle complex problems related to climate change and weather patterns. The project also aims to increase the competitiveness of Japan Inc. by providing a powerful computational tool to develop breakthroughs in drugs, materials and new technologies.

Riken can also be used to bolster the push for renewable energy by discovering the most efficient materials to convert the sun's rays to electricity, or protect people from natural disasters by predicting the impact from earthquakes and tsunami.

The K Computer is packed with computing muscle. It stitches together 68,544 processors, each equipped with eight cores for a total 548,352 electronic brains. At full capacity, it aims to have 640000 electronic brains. The machine will be equipped with enough horsepower to slash the time required to run a simulation of a beating human heart reacting to new medicine to two days from two years.
There are five U.S. supercomputers in the top 10 ranking, including the third-ranked system called Jaguar at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The rest of the top 10 include two machines from China, two from Japan and one from France.

The Top500 list is compiled by researchers at the University of Mannheim in Germany, the University of Tennessee and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, which is affiliated with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.