Japan is aiming to develop a supercomputer it hopes will be fast enough to help it regain the top spot it lost to US makers last year in an industry that is often seen as a proxy fight for technological supremacy. The government wants to develop a supercomputer that can handle over a quadrillion calculations per second as early as the fiscal year ending in March 2011, an official at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology said on Monday.
That would compare with the 70.72 trillion calculations per second in independent tests last year for International Business Machines Corp's Blue Gene/L, currently the world's fastest computer built for the US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Agency.
Japan's fastest machine currently is NEC Corp's Earth Simulator, which boasts nearly 36 trillion calculations per second.