Japan takes supercomputer crown from China

A new supercomputing cluster in Japan has formally been declared the world's most powerful system, outpacing a rival Chinese machine.

The K Computer, based out of the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, placed first on the most recent edition of the Top500 supercomputer rankings. The 548352-core computing cluster was able to top out at a speed of 8.12 petaflops, more than eight quadrillion calculations per second.

Developed by Fujitsu, the K Computer sports thousands of 8-core SPARC64 processors as well as the custom-designed 5GB/s 'Tofu' interconnect platform. Eventually, Fujitsu plans to build the K Computer out with 80,000 processors and more than 1PB of memory, bringing its top speed to more than 10 petaflops.

Housed in a three-story building, the K Computer facility requires a separate building just to house the air and water cooling systems for the cluster. Fujitsu said that the cluster will be used for traditional high-performance computing tasks such as medical and physics modelling, engineering and simulations.

Coming in a distant second on the Top500 list was China's Tianhe-1A. The cluster, based at Tianjin's National Supercomputing Centre had been the fastest in the world since the autumn of 2010 when it reached speeds of nearly 2.6 petaflops.

The 1.76 petaflop Cray XT5 cluster from the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory placed third on the list, followed by China's Nebulae-Dawning cluster at the Shenzhen National Supercomputing Centre.

The fastest European supercomputer was France's Tera-100, which reached a top speed of 1.05 petaflops. The UK's top cluster was the University of Edinburgh's 280 teraflop HECToR system, ranked 24th.