Japanese supercomputer is world’s fastest
A Japanese supercomputer capable of performing more than 8quadrillion petaflops/s is being heralded as the fastest system in the world.
According to the TOP500 list, the K Computer is more powerful than the next five systems on the list combined. Built by Fujitsu, it currently combines 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx cpus, each with eight cores. This makes for a total of 548,352 cores.
The K Computer's name draws upon the Japanese word 'Kei' for 10quadrillions, representing the system's performance goal of 10petaflops. It is currently held at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe.
Unlike the Chinese Tianhe-1A system it displaced from the number one slot and other recent very large systems, the computer does not use graphics processors or other accelerators. It was also one of the most energy efficient systems on the list.
