The world is always in a state of change and flux and today’s world is no exception. Digitisation and automation are now becoming the in-thing and it is making various human forms of industrial work and labour obsolete. While there are many countries and their people trying to resist this change, there are a few who are moving with the tide. Japan is one such country which is in the second category. The nation is working hard to build the fastest supercomputer in the world. This is being done to take care of the various malaises impacting the country. According to Reuters, it is believed that an amount of $173 million is being spent on this project. The superfast machine is supposedly capable of achieving 130 petaflops. It is likely to beat the current number one in the world, China’s Sunway TaihuLight.
A Change With The Future In Mind
The going has not been good for Japan these last few years. It has to contend with an ageing workforce and an economy that is slow in growth. Japan has been the harbinger of many technological changes but over the past many years, China has stolen a march over Japan – especially in the field of consumer electronics. It was way back in 2011 that Fujitsu’s K Computer came first in the world ranking 10.5 petaflops.
The proposed supercomputer will consumer over 15 MW. It also is being built with power effectiveness in mind specifically with regard to the power required for cooling and the power required for computing. The objective is to keep the ratio of power usage effectiveness of PUE to below 1.1. “This is something which is achieved only by the most efficient data centres in the world” said Monty Reynolds, from the IT Company Godalming.
New Learning
AIST is targeting a new area and is focusing their supercomputers for calculations such as atmospheric modelling and nuclear weapon simulations. It also is targeting machine learning and deep learning amongst other things. The country has got various enquiries from companies to build this machine to be codenamed as ABCI or Al Bridging Cloud Infrastructure. The winner will be chosen after December 8th and it is predicted to be operational in 2018. When it is operational, Japan might rent out the same to companies who use Microsoft and Google so that they can pander to the local population. It is worth the watch.
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