Japan operates a number of centers for supercomputing which hold world records in speed, with the

K computer The K computer named for the Japanese word/numeral , meaning 10 quadrillion (1016)See Japanese numbers was a supercomputer manufactured by Fujitsu, installed at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Hyōgo Pre ...

becoming the world's fastest in June 2011. and Fugaku took the lead in June 2020, and furthered it, as of November 2020, to 3 times faster than number two computer. The K computer's performance was impressive, according to professor

Jack Dongarra Jack Joseph Dongarra (born July 18, 1950) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the American University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the Unive ...

who maintains the

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non- distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coinci ...

list of

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

s, and it surpassed its next 5 competitors combined. The K computer cost US$10 million a year to operate.

Previous records

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

's entry into supercomputing began in the early 1980s. In 1982,

Osaka University , abbreviated as , is a public research university located in Osaka Prefecture, Japan. It is one of Japan's former Imperial Universities and a Designated National University listed as a "Top Type" university in the Top Global University Project. ...

's LINKS-1 Computer Graphics System used a

massively parallel Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of th ...

processing architecture, with 514

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circu ...

s, including 257 Zilog Z8001 control processors and 257 iAPX 86/20 floating-point processors. It was mainly used for rendering realistic 3D computer graphics. It was the world's most powerful computer, as of 1984. The SX-3 supercomputer family was developed by

NEC Corporation is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before rebranding in 1983 as NEC. It provides IT and network soluti ...

and announced in April 1989. The SX-3/44R became the fastest supercomputer in the world in 1990. Fujitsu's

Numerical Wind Tunnel Numerical Wind Tunnel (数値風洞) was an early implementation of the vector parallel architecture developed in a joint project between National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan and Fujitsu. It was the first supercomputer with a sustained performanc ...

supercomputer gained the top spot in 1993. Japanese supercomputers continued to top the

lists up until 1997. The K computer's placement on the top spot was seven years after Japan held the title in 2004.

NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before rebranding in 1983 as NEC. It provides IT and network solu ...

Earth Simulator The is a series of supercomputers deployed at Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology Yokohama Institute of Earth Sciences. Earth Simulator (first generation) The first generation of Earth Simulator, developed by the Japanese g ...

supercomputer built by

at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) was the fastest in the world at that time. It used 5,120

NEC SX-6 The SX-6 is a NEC SX supercomputer built by NEC Corporation that debuted in 2001; the SX-6 was sold under license by Cray Inc. in the U.S. Each SX-6 single-node system contains up to eight vector processors, which share up to 64 GB of computer mem ...

i processors, generating a performance of 28,293,540 MIPS (

million One million (1,000,000), or one thousand thousand, is the natural number following 999,999 and preceding 1,000,001. The word is derived from the early Italian ''millione'' (''milione'' in modern Italian), from ''mille'', "thousand", plus the au ...

instructions per second). It also had a peak performance of 131

TFLOPS In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate meas ...

(131 trillion

floating-point In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents real numbers approximately, using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. For example, 12.345 can be r ...

operations per second), using proprietary

vector processing In computing, a vector processor or array processor is a central processing unit (CPU) that implements an instruction set where its instructions are designed to operate efficiently and effectively on large one-dimensional arrays of data call ...

chips. The

used over 60,000 commercial

scalar Scalar may refer to: *Scalar (mathematics), an element of a field, which is used to define a vector space, usually the field of real numbers *Scalar (physics), a physical quantity that can be described by a single element of a number field such a ...

SPARC64 VIIIfx processors housed in over 600 cabinets. The fact that

was over 60 times faster than the Earth Simulator, and that the Earth Simulator ranked as the 68th system in the world 7 years after holding the top spot, demonstrates both the rapid increase in top performance in Japan and the widespread growth of supercomputing technology worldwide.

Supercomputing centers

The GSIC Center at the

Tokyo Institute of Technology is a national research university located in Greater Tokyo Area, Japan. Tokyo Tech is the largest institution for higher education in Japan dedicated to science and technology, one of first five Designated National University and selected as ...

houses the Tsubame 2.0 supercomputer, which has a peak of 2,288

and in June 2011 ranked 5th in the world. It was developed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in collaboration with

and HP, and has 1,400 nodes using both HP Proliant and NVIDIA Tesla processors. The

RIKEN MDGRAPE-3 MDGRAPE-3 is an ultra-high performance petascale supercomputer system developed by the Riken research institute in Japan. It is a special purpose system built for molecular dynamics simulations, especially protein structure prediction. MDGRAPE-3 ...

for molecular dynamics simulations of proteins is a special purpose petascale supercomputer at the Advanced Center for Computing and Communication, RIKEN in

Wakō, Saitama is a city located in Saitama Prefecture, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 84,161 in 42,434 households and a population density of 7600 persons per km². The total area of the city is . Geography Wakō is located on the southern ...

, just outside Tokyo. It uses over 4,800 custom MDGRAPE-3 chips, as well as

Intel Xeon Xeon ( ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded system markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same ar ...

processors. However, given that it is a special purpose computer, it can not appear on the

list which requires Linpack benchmarking. The next significant system is

Japan Atomic Energy Agency The is an Independent Administrative Institution formed on October 1, 2005 by a merger of two previous semi-governmental organizations. While it inherited the activities of both JNC and JAERI, it also inherited the nickname of JAERI, "Genken" ...

's PRIMERGY BX900

Fujitsu is a Japanese multinational information and communications technology equipment and services corporation, established in 1935 and headquartered in Tokyo. Fujitsu is the world's sixth-largest IT services provider by annual revenue, and the l ...

supercomputer. It is significantly slower, reaching 200 TFLOPS and ranking as the 38th in the world in 2011. Historically, the Gravity Pipe (GRAPE) system for

astrophysics Astrophysics is a science that employs the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena. As one of the founders of the discipline said, Astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the nature of the he ...

at the

University of Tokyo , abbreviated as or UTokyo, is a public research university located in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Established in 1877, the university was the first Imperial University and is currently a Top Type university of the Top Global University Project by ...

was distinguished not by its top speed of 64 Tflops, but by its cost and energy efficiency, having won the

Gordon Bell Prize The Gordon Bell Prize, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize of Supercomputing, is an award presented by the Association for Computing Machinery each year in conjunction with the SC Conference series (formerly known as the Supercomputing Conferen ...

in 1999, at about $7 per megaflops, using special purpose processing elements. DEGIMA is a highly cost and energy-efficient computer cluster at the Nagasaki Advanced Computing Center,

Nagasaki University is a national university of Japan. Its nickname is ''Chōdai'' (). The main campus is located in Bunkyo-machi, Nagasaki City, Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan. History Nagasaki University was established in 1949 by incorporating several national ...

. It is used for hierarchical

N-body simulation In physics and astronomy, an ''N''-body simulation is a simulation of a dynamical system of particles, usually under the influence of physical forces, such as gravity (see ''n''-body problem for other applications). ''N''-body simulations ar ...

s and has a peak performance of 111 TFLOPS with an energy efficiency of 1376 MFLOPS/watt. The overall cost of the hardware was approximately US$500,000. The Computational Simulation Centre, International Fusion Energy Research Centre of the

ITER ITER (initially the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, ''iter'' meaning "the way" or "the path" in Latin) is an international nuclear fusion research and engineering megaproject aimed at creating energy by replicating, on Earth ...

Broader Approach/

operates a 1.52 PFLOPS supercomputer (currently operating at 442 TFLOPS) in

Rokkasho, Aomori is a village in Aomori Prefecture, Japan. , the village had an estimated population of 10,200, and a population density of 40 persons per km², in 4,855 households. The total area of the village is . Geography Rokkasho occupies the eastern coas ...

. The system, called Helios (Roku-chan in Japanese), consists of 4,410

Groupe Bull Bull SAS (also known as Groupe Bull, Bull Information Systems, or simply Bull) is a French computer company headquartered in Les Clayes-sous-Bois, in the western suburbs of Paris. The company has also been known at various times as Bull General ...

bullx B510 compute blades, and is used for

fusion Fusion, or synthesis, is the process of combining two or more distinct entities into a new whole. Fusion may also refer to: Science and technology Physics *Nuclear fusion, multiple atomic nuclei combining to form one or more different atomic nucl ...

simulation projects. The University of Tokyo's Information Technology Center in

Kashiwa, Chiba is a city located in Chiba Prefecture, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 433,436 in 194,216 households and a population density of 3800 persons per km². The total area of the city is . The name of the city is written with a si ...

, began operating Oakleaf-FX in April 2012. This supercomputer is a Fujitsu PRIMEHPC FX10 (a commercial version of the

) configured with 4,800 compute nodes for a peak performance of 1.13 PFLOPS. Each of the compute nodes is a SPARC64 IXfx processor connected to other nodes via a six-dimensional mesh/torus interconnect. In June 2012, the Numerical Prediction Division, Forecast Department of the

Japan Meteorological Agency The , abbreviated JMA, is an agency of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. It is charged with gathering and providing results for the public in Japan that are obtained from data based on daily scientific observation an ...

deployed an 847 TFLOPS

Hitachi () is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. It is the parent company of the Hitachi Group (''Hitachi Gurūpu'') and had formed part of the Nissan ''zaibatsu'' and later DKB Group and Fuyo G ...

SR16000/M1 supercomputer, which is based on the IBM Power 775, at the Office of Computer Systems Operations and the Meteorological Satellite Center in

Kiyose, Tokyo is a city located in Tokyo Metropolis, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 74,972 in 36,376 households, and a population density of 7300 persons per km2. The total area of the city was . Geography Kiyose City is roughly in the sh ...

. The system consists of two SR16000/M1s, each a cluster of 432-logical nodes. Each node consists of four 3.83 GHz IBM

POWER7 POWER7 is a family of superscalar multi-core microprocessors based on the Power ISA 2.06 instruction set architecture released in 2010 that succeeded the POWER6 and POWER6+. POWER7 was developed by IBM at several sites including IBM's Rochest ...

processors and 128 GB of memory. The system is used to run a high-resolution (2 km horizontally and 60 layers vertically, up to 9-hour forecast) local weather forecast model every hour.

Grid computing

Starting in 2003, Japan used

grid computing Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished from c ...

in the National Research Grid Initiative (NAREGI) project to develop high-performance, scalable grids over very high-speed networks as a future computational infrastructure for scientific and engineering research.

References

{{Reflist, 30em

External links

GSIC Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology

The GRAPE site at the University of Tokyo
Supercomputer sites Supercomputing Science and technology in Japan

Previous records

Supercomputing centers

Grid computing

See also

References

External links