The New York Times is reporting that a new Fujitsu supercomputer, known as “K Computer,” is three times faster than a Chinese rival that previously held the top position. With 8.162 Petaflops of performance on LINPACK, the K computer is now number one on the latest TOP500 list that was released this morning at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany.
K, built by Fujitsu and located at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan, represents a giant leap forward in speed. It will also undoubtedly be a source of national pride for Japan, at least among computer scientists, who take the race for fastest computer quite seriously.
“It’s a very impressive machine,” Mr. Dongarra said. “It’s a lot more powerful than the other computers.”
The TOP500 site is swamped right now, but I can tell you that the Tianhe-1A system in China is now #2 on the list. Jaguar, the fastest supercomputer in the U.S. came in at the #3 spot.
Great achievement for Japan, Fujitsu, RIKEN and for HPC, with Sparc processors, no gpgpus needed and excellent power metric! By the way, K is for Kei which is the Japanese character for 10^16 = 10 PETA, which is approximately the nominal peak when all 640,000 cores will be operating.