Japan Builds World's Fastest Computer

claylikethemud writes "The New York Times reports that Japan has built the world's most powerful supercomputer from "640 specialized nodes that are in turn composed of 5,104" NEC processors. The machine boasts the computing power equivalent to the 20 fastest American supercomputers combined, and with a top speed of 35.6 teraflops, outpaces the next fastest machine, the ASCI White Pacific, by more than factor of five. Applications include climate modeling, global warming prediction, and other non-weapons research."

Comments

Did anyone see this coming?

[saihung]

With all of the supercomputer posts on /. recently, I've seen a lot of talk about the various ASCI projects in the works by IBM and others. No one even mentioned this before. I'm glad to see that someone is building supercomputers for reasons other than nuclear weapons research though.

Re:Did anyone see this coming?

[JabberWokky]

I'm glad to see that someone is building supercomputers for reasons other than nuclear weapons research though.

For some reason Japan isn't all that keen on nuclear weapons.

--
Evan

Re:Did anyone see this coming?

[Alan Partridge]

the US didn't GROW into a superpower, it's just that the British Empire collapsed, Germany was crushed, France fell apart and Japan was bombed into the stone age. With all the competition gone (and many of their best minds harvested) the US won by default.

US:bombs vs. Japan: environment

[pubjames]

Interesting comment from the SJ Mercury

The accomplishment is also a dramatic statement of contrasting scientific and technology priorities in the United States and Japan. The Japanese machine was built to analyze climate change, including global warming, as well as weather and earthquake patterns. The United States has predominantly focused its efforts on building powerful computers for simulating weapons.

Re:US:bombs vs. Japan: environment

[Ed Avis]

What surprises me is that this is the first we (Slashdot readers) have heard about it. There have been several headlines saying 'new supercomputer planned' with a story 'it will be quite fast, and finished in 2004'... but this new world's-fastest-computer just suddenly appeared without being preannounced.

Are any of the supercomputer projects in the pipeline expected to be faster than this?

Re:US:bombs vs. Japan: environment

[macshit]

That is probably why they don't have a military (I think they now have a token military but not a real one)

Actually, Japan has one of the largest military budgets in the world. They call their military the `Self Defense Forces', but it's the real thing, with big ships, tanks, fighter jets, and all that good stuff. No nukes though.

Re:US:bombs vs. Japan: environment

[fr2asbury]

The US military budget is SO high, because when we go to war, we want to destroy weapons and remove evil doers with surgical precision. All the while making the locals love the US.
The US ideally would go to war where only weapons ould be destroyed and noone would get killed.
To acieve this goal our weapons have to be extremely high tech.
Oddly enough it's value of all human life, both ours and the people in the region we're fighting that makes our budget so huge.

Cheers,

Jonathan

Re:US:bombs vs. Japan: environment

[CokeBear]

Canadians of course!
You never know when some pesky Canadians on a training exercise in Afganistan will suddenly turn their weapons on an American F16.

Re:US:bombs vs. Japan: environment

[snarkh]

Oddly enough it's value of all human life, both ours and the people in the region we're fighting that makes our budget so huge.

Yeah, sure. Keep thinking that.

Re:US:bombs vs. Japan: environment

[Anonymous Coward]

"The US military budget is SO high, because when we go to war, we want to destroy weapons and remove evil doers with surgical precision. All the while making the locals love the US."

I disagree. The whole aim is simply to insure that the pictures on the evening news don't emulate those which occured (due to poor military public relations management) in Vietnam. What is now prefered is that deaths on the part of those being bombed occur later (due to a destroyed infrastructure, in cases like bombing of Yugoslavia, "economic leverage" or depleted radiation sources, in the case of Iraq), are attributable to U.S.A. client states wholly or mostly facilitated by the U.S. (as in Palestine, Columbia,..), or otherwise as a result of "indirect" or covert U.S. military intervention (whether by e.g. U.S. funded militias in Columbia and Central America, or *directly* forseeable killings as in Kosovo). This new U.S.A. military humanism is nothing more than a public relations ploy. The lesson is that with enough money, one can disguise even the most horrific massacres as humanitarian intervention.

Those recently leaked pentagon documents which describe strategies for use of smaller scale nuclear weapons in a tightly (in a public relations sense) targeted context ("bunker busting" etc.) threaten an attempt to circumvent the general global condemnation of the use of such terrifying devices by exactly these means, and leave no question that they'll kill whomever opposes them if they can get away with it.

If you work in the U.S., roughly half your taxes go to fund the military. Please think about it.

-Yon
yon@proptronix.com

So when does a computer...

[Bnonn]

...become a huge goddamned distributed-network-in-a-room?

Re:Non Weapon research??

[SuiteSisterMary]

The Japanese are only able to maintain a defensive force, not an army, so even if it was weapons research, it would only be for use in self defense.

Well, American policy has always been that it's nukes are purely defensive weapons (like the Peacekeepers) so the argument could be made..... Oh, I forgot. What's OK for America isn't OK for any other country.

Do you really have to ask?

[w00d]

"All in all, it is a surprisingly large amount for a country that doesn't go into military actions. Who are they defending themselves from?"

Red China and North Korea, for starters (who both have nukes, BTW). They don't exactly have the friendliest of neighbors over there. They would be stupid not to have a good defensive force.

New news!

[whereiswaldo]

Finally, some new news (as opposed to "this is nothing new").

Question - why is it that we JUST found out about this? How long did it take to build this giant supercomputer? Companies like IBM talk about what they're building long before they are done. Speaking of which, I guess IBM's Deep Blue is kinda underpowered now, relatively speaking.

One more thing - why all the hub-bub about US export restrictions re: computer power? If Japan already has this much computing power, who wants our "junk" anyway?
I lied - one more thing - does the NSA have penis envy over this? Or is their computer still faster? ;)

This is very good for lots of reasons

[gotak]

This is great news really. With the supercomputers built for weapons research naturally people doing "normal" research will have problems getting access.

After all they don't want just anyone poking around and finding things they shouldn't.

But with non weapons research systems I can see academics from all over the world getting easier access and maybe something interesting can happen.

Like that would do anything...

[sterno]

Okay, so then the Japanese complain about us dumping. Then what? Let's say they win in WTO hearings. How nice for them. Then the US just ignores it. Why? Because we can. What real punishment can the WTO provide?

The WTO is totally powerless, especially against the US. The only thing it provides is a common forum for working these issues out and for establishing a sort of trade best practices. But when you get right down to it, trade disputes are settled as they always have been, either through discussion, or through various embargoes, tariffs, etc. The WTO may add some legitimacy to a particular countries use of some tariffs, etc, but overall it doesn't provide any significant sanctioning ability.

That's the funny thing with all of the world governmental bodies. They have no real power, they mostly just serve as negotiating platforms. The real power continues to be held by individual nations and there's no evidence that they'll be giving up that power anytime soon.

Re:You do not know what you are talking about

[JabberWokky]

First off, it was a single line comment only semiserious. Second, you say I don't know what I'm talking about, and you quote an article (as you put it, "I like to cut and paste") that contains:

Nuclear weapons are the most sensitive issue in Japan, Japanese people are strongly against it. Since the nuclear accident in Ibaraki Prefecture in 1999, the most serious nuclear leakage accident, Japanese citizens have lost confidence about nuclear industry, they asked governments to reduce or stop nuclear power plant construction.

So how, exactly, do I "not know what I'm talking about"? --
Evan

Re:enough with the Quaking already

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the really powerful ones were made for Chess

Japan has the largest NON-CLASSIFIED box

[AIXadmin]

It would not suprise me if the US all ready had a petaflop of super computing power or more in one machine. The box might sit down at some government agency like the NSA (the worlds largest employer of mathmaticians) and be classified so that no person without a clearance and need to know will ever know about it. At least for thirty years or so.

Disclaimer:
I have no clearance , so this is sheer speculation on my part.