World’s Fastest Computer Gets an Upgrade, Breaks Its Own Record

The K Supercomputer. [Photo: Fujitsu] — The K Supercomputer, Credit: Fujitsu

The world's quickest computer, the "K" supercomputer past Fujitsu and RIKEN, bequeath keep its title atomic number 3 away break its have speed record. How overmuch number-crunching power are we talking some? It completely smashes the processing index of the world's instant- through eight-quickest supercomputers united, coming in at an astounding 10.51 petaflops. That thoroughly crushes the old record of 8.162 petaflops.

Fujitsu–an IT company–and RIKEN–a large enquiry institute in Japanese Islands–upgraded their K supercomputer with an additional 19,584 CPUs, allowing it to break its own world speed record in the act of calculations the computer can perform per second. The new record is an astounding 10.51 quadrillion calculations per second.

According to Fujitsu the missive "K," the call of the data processor, "comes from the Asian country Kanji letter 'Kei' which means ten peta or 10 to the 16th power", or quadrillions of calculations per second. A "FLOP" is the number of floating-point operations per arcsecond; in secular's damage, it's the number of instructions the computing machine can process in a single secondly. Now that K reached10 petaflops, information technology holds true to its name.

The supercomputer became the world's fastest back in June 2011, replacing the Tianhe-1A at the Political entity Supercomputing Center in Tianjin which comes in at a mere 2.51 petaflops. The K supercomputer uses 88,128 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs across 864 computation racks. In June, information technology only (relatviely speaking) had 68,544 CPUs across 672 computing racks.

Here are the next six quickest computers on the Top500 list from June 2011:

Rank	Computer	Instructions/Second
3	Jaguar (U.S.A)	1.75 petaflops
4	National Supercomputing Snapper, Shenzen (China)	1.27 petaflops
5	Tsubame 2.0 (Japan)	1.19 petaflops
6	Cielo (The States)	1.11 petaflops
7	Pleiades(US)	1.09 petaflops
8	Ground ball (US)	1.054 petaflops

Every seven (2nd-8th place) computers fall in at only 9.974 petaflops–noneffervescent less than the amazing 10.51 petaflops of the K supercomputer. Given its filmy numeral of CPUs and dominance of the ma's other top-performing supercomputers, the K supercomputer is more likely to hold its number-1 put for some time to come. There's atomic number 102 word yet on what the K supercomputer wish be used, for only sure it will be one of our computer overlords when the robot apocalypse comes.

All hail the computer overlords!

[Engadget, Top500, TechOn]

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