A New League Leader

Japan puts China in the supercomputing back seat and, unlike China, Japan didn’t have to steal the technology to do it.

Japan’s ‘K Computer’ takes supercomputer crown

Japan’s K Computer, which can crunch more than 8 quadrillion calculations per second, is the top supercomputer, according to the Top 500 list of high-performance systems.

The K Computer, housed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, puts Japan back in the top spot for the first time since Nov. 2004.

. . .

Japan’s K Computer bumped the previous top dog—China’s Tianhe-1A supercomputer. The K Computer is built by Fujitsu and has 548,352 cores, or 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs with eight cores each. It’s also notable that the K Computer doesn’t use graphics processors or accelerators.

See also:
Japan back on top in supercomputer race
Japanese supercomputer is world’s fastest
Japan’s “K Computer” is Now the Fastest Supercomputer in the World
Special ‘K’ fastest computer ever
If No. 2 was OK, No. 1 is better / Supercomputer impresses all, including skeptical politician Renho
Riken nabs supercomputer title
Supercomputer “K computer” Takes First Place in World
Japan Takes No. 1 Spot on Top500
Japan King Of Supercomputer Hill Again After 7-Year Hiatus
Japan Rises to Reclaim Top 500 Supercomputing Title
K Computer Makes Your Gaming Rig Look Lazy
K computer
K computer

The Japanese K computer is quite impressive, massively large, and it looks like it sucks an enormous amount of electricity. All that computing power and they still can’t accurately predict the weather.

/gee, I sure hope it doesn’t run Windows