JapanÆs Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (Riken) claims to have developed the worldÆs fastest supercomputer. A report in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said the government-run institute had tested the machine and confirmed it can execute calculations four times faster than the ASCI Option Red model at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, previously the worldÆs fastest computer.
Developed by Riken’s Computational Science Laboratory, the computer contains 2,688 newly-developed microchips, each of which can handle calculations 27 times
faster than microprocessors used in PCs, the report said.
In experiments using half power, the supercomputer ran at 10 trillion floating point operations per second, four times faster than Sandia’s machine. The report quoted researchers as saying if operated at full capacity the machine can theoretically run at 50 trillion floating point operations per second, at least 10 times faster than the record. By the end of next year, Riken plans to have two of the supercomputers linked together to create a machine that can run at 100 trillion floating point operations per second, the researchers said.
The report said the new machine will be used to analyze protein molecular structure, and is expected to become a powerful tool for pharmaceutical development.
