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Japan Planning Exascale Computer For 2020

Posted by Soulskill on from the go-big-or-go-home dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Japan has thrown its hat into the ring for exascale computing, reported the country's newspapers. The goal: achieve one exaFLOPS of performance by 2020. Japan's finance ministry has agreed to begin work next fiscal year on a supercomputer with a performance capability 100 times that of the K computer, a 10-petaFLOPS computer that debuted as the most powerful supercomputer in the world in 2011. The midterm report for the new supercomputer was concluded Thursday, the Asahi Shimbun business daily reported. The Japan Times was slightly more conservative, reporting that the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry will seek funding to design the new machine in its fiscal 2014 budget request — implying that the project has not necessarily been approved. The science ministry is hoping to keep the cost of the new supercomputer below the ¥110 billion mark ($1.08 billion) that was required to develop the K computer, the paper reported. (Slashdot couldn't find any evidence that the project had been approved on the ministry Webpage, although the K computer was mentioned several times in a discussion of public-private partnerships.)"

21 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. priorities... by schlachter · · Score: 4, Interesting

    we could build several of these for the price of a single B2 bomber.
    wish we would spend our money on something like this instead.

    --
    My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
    1. Re:priorities... by alphaminus · · Score: 1

      Yeah but the B2 won't be obsolete by the time it's built. :P

    2. Re: priorities... by phobos512 · · Score: 1

      Just a gentle reminder...you wouldn't have the Internet if it hadn't been for the defense industry.

    3. Re: priorities... by Laxori666 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Not necessarily true. Maybe it would have been developed by universities or something. It's like saying the radio wouldn't have existed if none of the people involved in creating the first radio were born. Other people would probably have invented it.

    4. Re: priorities... by schlachter · · Score: 1

      The Defense Industry has sent men to the moon in the 60s, built the internet, GPS, and super computers.

      These companies don't only work for the Defense Department and they don't only build bombers.

      --
      My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
    5. Re: priorities... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The "defense industry" and "DARPA" are not necessarily the same. Alas, enjoy your corporatism...

    6. Re:priorities... by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Yeah but the B2 won't be obsolete by the time it's built. :P

      That didn't stop the F-22 project, did it?

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    7. Re:priorities... by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      damn, you're right. and think of how far we could push the state of the art of nuclear weapons design with those machines.

  2. Brain by slash.jit · · Score: 1

    So how many flops does a human brain has ?

    1. Re:Brain by mangu · · Score: 1

      The top systems today are approximately at the same capacity as a human brain.

      Brain neurons perform an operation that's similar to a dot product. Their operation can be simulated by a weight for each dendrite that's multiplied by that dendrite's input.

      In rough order of magnitude, a human brain has a hundred billion neurons, or 1e11 in standard computer language notation. Each neuron has an average of one thousand inputs, 1e3, and performs a hundred operations per second. That is 1e11 * 1e3 * 1e2 = 1e16 flops, or 10,000 teraflops.

      According to Top500, the highest powered computer system in November 2012 had a capacity of 17,590 teraflops.

      This doesn't mean it has the same ability as a human brain, because there's also the software involved. There is a project, sponsored by Google, that tries to implement a computer system operating close to what the human brain does.

      When they tested that system presenting to it one million random screenshots from Youtube videos, the system learned all by itself to recognize objects that appeared on those videos, like human faces and cats.

      There's a good technical tutorial on this system at the Stanford university site, and a more basic explanation can be found in several popular articles if you google for "deep learning".

    2. Re:Brain by slash.jit · · Score: 1

      thanks for the info

  3. Re:More powerful than TOP500 by lister+king+of+smeg · · Score: 1

    you mean like the complex being built by the NSA in the Utah desert. good luck finding stats on that if you do look forward to a visit by the black helicopters and SUV's.

    --
    ---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
  4. About damn time by bahaelaila7 · · Score: 3, Funny

    I totally concur with japan, i guess the emperor was frustrated at the performance of photoshop CS6. That's the type of computers Adobe makes multimedia editing software for

    1. Re:About damn time by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

      What does a Japanese man need with CS6 when he can create beautiful art with Microsoft Excel .

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
  5. Bitcoin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Meanwhile, the Bitcoin network has already broken the equivalent of the exaFLOP barrier. Of course you can't coordinate this computing power in the same way, but it's interesting to note.

  6. 1996 teraflop 2006 petaflop on Linpack by peter303 · · Score: 2

    Moores law predicts 1000x per 15 years.

  7. Electricity bill by loufoque · · Score: 2

    The main challenge of exascale computing is energy efficiency. It's going to cost 100 million dollars per year in electricity alone.

  8. If they build robots, might as well... by ikhider · · Score: 1

    Things we have now, like CD's, rocket ships, the internet, tablet computers, televideo started off as science fiction and Japan is a M A S S I V E exporter of sci-fi, from anime to manga to the Haikasoru sci-fi book series--so it makes sense they build the odd super computer.

    --
    "SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
  9. ...and MTBF. by gentryx · · Score: 1

    Power consumption and mean time between failure are the current major challenges. What good would a exa-scale supercomputer be, if you couldn not run a full-system job on it for even one hour?

    --
    Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
    1. Re:...and MTBF. by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      What good would a exa-scale supercomputer be, if you couldn not run a full-system job on it for even one hour?

      It would be one hour more worth than current Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Systems.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
  10. What are they going to use it for? by satuon · · Score: 1

    Are there enough heavy-computing tasks that will keep this computer occupied? Is there a shortage of computing power currently?