A couple readers and friends have sent in pointers to this recent development: Japan’s targeting a 10 PFLOPS computer in 2011. The interesting bit is the team that RIKEN has put together to build it includes rivals Hitachi, NEC, and Fujitsu.
From the story at Tech-On!:
The Working Group for the Assessment of the Next-Generation Supercomputer Framework Design under Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has summarized and disclosed an “assessment report” about the architecture of the next-generation supercomputer being developed toward the goal set in FY2011.
The report predicts that the next-generation supercomputer’s architecture will be a multi-system combining an accelerator-embedded scalar computer and a vector computer.
The report cites a specific, testosterone-laden goal: “winning the top position in June 2011″ on the Top500 list.
The architecture looks a lot like what Cray and others are talking about with respect to heterogeneous systems
The outline of the architecture is…a scalar processor-based computing system added with an accelerator is combined with a vector processor-based computing system.
Leave your own comment