Fujitsu is to develop the world's fastest computer. The Japanese company hopes to deliver the 10-petaflop supercomputer, 10 times more powerful than today's fastest system, by 2011.
Fujitsu is building the supercomputer for Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, known as RIKEN, said Takumi Maruyama, head of Fujitsu's processor development department.
The system will be based on Fujitsu's upcoming Sparc64 VIIIfx processor, which has eight processor cores and will be an update to the four-core Sparc64 VII chip that Fujitsu released two years ago, Maruyama said.
It remains to be seen if Fujitsu can achieve its goal, and it's likely that other system builders are plotting similarly powerful machines. IBM has said it will build a "petascale" supercomputer based on its upcoming Power7 processor for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. That machine, dubbed Blue Waters, is also due in 2011.
Today's fastest machine is IBM's Roadrunner system at the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, which was rated at 1.105 petaflops on June's Top500 list of supercomputers. A petaflop is equal to one thousand trillion calculations per second.
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