Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Oh Kei

There's a nice puff piece here for the "京" (kei, meaning 10^16) computer which is currently fastest in the world. This is really Japan's follow-up to the Earth Simulator in the world-beating supercomputer arena, though there have been several new computers installed around the country which are faster than the old ES (not least the ES2 which we currently use, which occupies about 1/4 of the space of the old ES but has about 4 times the processing power). But similarly to the ES back in 2002, the K computer is a big step up and fastest in the world by a big margin.

In fact the K Computer has been the fastest for some time even while still being set up, but has only just recently achieved it's design target of 10 petaflops (10^16 flops, hence the name). Not that it's all rosy - these things cost a lot, and the value may be somewhat questionable: "one great question still hanging over such ambitions is whether Japan will be able to nurture enough scientists capable of exploiting these computers' untapped potential". Well, it's lucky that JAMSTEC isn't in charge of the new computer, as nurturing scientists is hardly their priority...

2 comments:

crf said...

http://www.skatelescope.org/the-technology/software-and-computing/

http://ska-jp.org/

James Shah said...

Yes, Android Application Development heard about this computer.It is currently fastest in the word.