Japan Plans To Develop World’s Fastest Supercomputer By 2017

Japan, which is considered as one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, is now on its way to develop the world's fastest and the most efficient supercomputer. The supercomputer in question is expected to make an appearance sometime in 2017 courtesy Japan's ‎National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST).

The current world leader, China's Sunway TaihuLight, has a processing capacity of 93 petaflops, which means it performs 93 quadrillion calculations per second. The upcoming supercomputer from Japan, dubbed AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI), is expected to outperform Sunway TaihuLight with a whopping processing capacity of 130 petaflops. The newest innovation will reportedly help boost driving car technology, robotics, medical technology and more. The Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is going to invest around $173 million, or 19.5 billion yen in the development of the new supercomputer.

Notably, Japan's AIST is also aiming to run the upcoming supercomputer AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI) on less than 3 megawatts of power.  Comparatively, China's Sunway Taihulight runs on 15 megawatts.

"As far as we know, there is nothing out there that is as fast," said Satoshi Sekiguchi, director general at Japan's ‎National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST).

Sekiguchi added that the highly anticipated supercomputer will help make use of medical records to develop new applications and services. In fact, the superefficient machine will be made available to business corporations in Japan which currently outsource data crunching to overseas firms such as Google and Microsoft for a certain amount of fee.

ABCI will be developed at the University of Tokyo's Kashiwa Campus, which is located around 40 kilometers northeast of Tokyo. The supercomputer will likely run on a Linux operating system like most currently active supercomputers. Bidding for the supercomputer project will stay open until Dec. 8, 2016.