Fujitsu to build Japan's next-generation supercomputer

Tokyo
The Economic Times
Japan's next-generation supercomputer will be made by Fujitsu Ltd. after its two partners withdrew from a government-sponsored project to develop the computer which will achieve the world's highest performance of 10 petaflops.

Fujitsu will make the supercomputer for the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, an independent administrative institution known as RIKEN.

RIKEN decided to employ Fujitsu's scalar processing architecture for the supercomputer as other two Japanese firms, NEC Corp. and Hitachi Ltd. have withdrawn from an earlier attempt to combine their vector architecture with the Fujitsu system.

As originally planned, Fujitsu and RIKEN said they will complete the supercomputer at a facility in Kobe, Hyogo Prefecture, by fiscal 2012 ending in March 2013 under the USD 1.22 billion project. The total cost is expected to top the planned level, Kyodo news agency reported.

The supercomputer is designed to use a 128-gigaflop central processing unit, the world's fastest at present, to achieve the world's highest performance of 10 petaflops.

NEC in May offered to withdraw from the project citing a slump in its earnings. Hitachi followed suit, the report said.

Before the offer, the education ministry's project assessment group had doubted if the two architectures could be combined successfully, it said.