IT abroad: Japan takes first place on TOP-500 supercomputer list

The new supercomputer in Japan has become the world’s most powerful supercomputer. The results have been released in the latest biannual TOP-500 publication - the list of Top 500 supercomputers on the planet. Judging by the performance, the new Japanese supercomputer outdoes the Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer, which took the number one position in the list last year.

The new Japanese supercomputer is called “K”. Its performance was measured using 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs each with eight cores, for a total of 548,352 cores, almost twice as many as any other system on the Top-500 list. The computer is still under construction, and when it enters service in November 2012 it will have more than 80,000 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs according to its manufacturer, Fujitsu.

The new supercomputer’s performance equals 8.16 petaflops (quadrillion calculations per second). Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer, which took the number one position in November last year, boasts only 2.57 petaflops performance. Nevertheless, China continues to grow the number of systems it has on the list, up from 42 (November 2010) to 62 systems.

Experts claim, that unlike other supercomputers, the Japanese “K” computer doesn't use graphics processors or other accelerators. It uses the most power, but is also one of the most energy-efficient systems on the list.

The Japanese supercomputer is installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe. When finished, it is intended to run at over 10 petaflops.

According to the latest TOP-500 the U.S. has five systems in the top 10; Japan and China have two each, and France has one.

IBM is the dominant manufacturer on the list with 213 systems in the Top-500, followed by Hewlett-Packard with 153. Intel and AMD continue to provide the processors for a majority of the systems on list.