Japan eyes supercomputer crown

Japan plans to build the world’s fastest supercomputer to aid research into driverless cars, robotics and medical diagnostics

TOP 15 FASTEST SUPERCOMPUTERS

Petaflop performance – quadrillion calculations per second

ABCI *(coming 2017) JPN 130.0
Sunway TaihuLight CHN 93.0 Current fastest supercomputer built June 2016, in Wuxi, China
Tianhe-2 CHN 33.9
Titan USA 17.6
Sequoia USA 17.2
Cori USA 14.0
Oakforest-PACS JPN 13.6
K computer JPN 10.5
Piz Daint SUI 9.8
Mira - BlueGene USA 8.6
Trinity (military) USA 8.1
Cray XC40 GBR 6.8 
Marconi ITA 6.8
Pleiades (NASA) USA 6.0
Hazel Hen GER 5.6

Total cores: 10,649,600 Memory: 1,310,720 GB

SENSE OF SCALE
Petaflop: Unit of measurement for performance of processor power
Peta: Means quadrillion, which looks like: 1,000,000,000,000,000
Flop: Stands for Floating Point Operations Per Second
ABCI able to compute 130 quadrillion calculations per second.
If one person was to make same number of calculations at rate of one
every second, it would take 4 billion years to complete task

*Proposed $173 million AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure supercomputer
Sources: TechRepublic (CBS), University of Illinois, wire agencies