Japan wants to build the world's most powerful supercomputer

[G.O.G]

Japan plans to make room for supercomputing and its intention is to build the most powerful supercomputer in the world for two years.

At present, the United States and China are the two countries that dominate supercomputation, and Japan intends to get ahead with this project. In addition, it also hopes to regain its edge in the technology and electronics sector, where in many respects it has lost its preponderance against South Korea and China.

According to the Ministry of Economy, Commerce and Industry, the new project, called AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI), is a supercomputer that can perform 130 billion calculations per second, which implies that it will have a processing capacity of 130 petaflops, surpassing the capacities of the most powerful supercomputer in the world today, the Chinese Sunway TaihuLight of 93 petaflops.

The ABCI project is scheduled to be ready by 2018. Once built, the world's fastest supercomputer will be available to Japanese companies for a fee, a service currently offered by corporations such as Google and Microsoft.

At present, the Japanese government is receiving proposals from manufacturers who are willing to take responsibility for their manufacture. Fujitsu, the company that built the most powerful supercomputer in Japan so far (the Oakforest-PACS with 13.6 petaflops), has not wanted to confirm whether it has participated in the process with a proposal.

With this movement, the Japanese country aims to equip scientists with a research platform that allows advance in leading technologies. Japan wants to make use of ultra fast calculations to accelerate advances in artificial intelligence, favoring the development of deep learning and neural networks to apply it to driverless cars, robotics or medical diagnosis.