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Japan Eyes World's Fastest-Known Supercomputer, To Spend Over $150M On It (reuters.com)
Japan plans to build the world's fastest-known supercomputer in a bid to arm the country's manufacturers with a platform for research that could help them develop and improve driverless cars, robotics and medical diagnostics. From a Reuters report: The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will spend 19.5 billion yen ($173 million) on the previously unreported project, a budget breakdown shows, as part of a government policy to get back Japan's mojo in the world of technology. The country has lost its edge in many electronic fields amid intensifying competition from South Korea and China, home to the world's current best-performing machine. In a move that is expected to vault Japan to the top of the supercomputing heap, its engineers will be tasked with building a machine that can make 130 quadrillion calculations per second -- or 130 petaflops in scientific parlance -- as early as next year, sources involved in the project told Reuters. At that speed, Japan's computer would be ahead of China's Sunway Taihulight that is capable of 93 petaflops. "As far as we know, there is nothing out there that is as fast," said Satoshi Sekiguchi, a director general at Japan's âZNational Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, where the computer will be built.
It's strange how little people talk about the fact that we're approaching the end of this little plateau in the first silicon revolution. I'm sure this supercomputer is fast and all, but compared to what's economically feasible once the barriers are removed?
The second silicon revolution will be marked by price freefall as soon as enough patents expire and enough high-output[1] factories can come on-line. Eventually (at the most, perhaps a few decades from now), a major world government will realize that if they buy their own factories, keep 'em cranking out single board machines and flash memory at full speed 24/7 and if need be use some superfluous power plant that was about to be decommissioned... they could build a supercomputer the likes of which the world has never seen. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than myself could do some back of the napkin estimates here about what should be possible?
As an interesting aside, the power supply, display and input devices will end up becoming the most expensive parts of most consumer electronics, but I think the more interesting question is what the hell are they going to do with all of that computing power once the price floors give way? Protein folding, cryptography... and general AI.
1. The "high output" bit being the kicker. I know very little of the details of chip lithography, so maybe there are hangups here I'm unaware of.