Japanese Supercomputer Reaches 10-Petaflop Barrier

By Matthew Dublin

Japan's Riken Institute has pushed the K Computer — currently the world's fastest supercomputer — to the 10 petaflop barrier or 10.51 quadrillion floating point operations per second.

The K Computer is comprised of 864 server racks and over 88,000 interconnected CPUs, Fujitsu's SPARC64 VIIIfx processors. According to the industry Linpack benchmark, the K Computer’s average performance is about 93 percent of its theoretical peak speed of 11.28 petaflops.

Back in June, the K Computer topped the Top 500 list with a peak performance of 8.162 petaflops, however IBM and Cray are hot on its tail with 20 petaflop machines in the works for the Department of Energy that are slated to go live at the end of the year.

The K computer has 640,000 cores working around the clock on complex mathematical problems and eats about roughly 10 megawatts of energy, which is surprisingly energy efficient when compared to other supercomputers around the world.

The K Computer cost over 100 billion Yen — $1.25 billion US — to design and build.