Japan's upcoming 130-petaflops supercomputer will be the fastest in the world

Japan has been an important hub for technology. But the past few year have not been very fruitful for the country due to unforeseen natural disasters, but a strong will has kept the nation going. It recently announced a plan to build the world’s fastest and efficient supercomputer.  Called the Artificial Intelligence Bridging Cloud Infrastructure or AIBC, it is due for completion next year. According to reports, the new 130-petaflops supercomputer will cost $173 million. The AIBC will be a huge advancement for supercomputing and will greatly advance AI research as well as provide processing power for various companies, startups, and academic institutions. It will be constructed at the University of Tokyo’s Kashiwa Campus and like most active supercomputers, it will likely run on a Linux operating system. Currently the most advanced and powerful supercomputer in the world is China’s Sunway TaihuLight which can perform 93-petaflops, followed by the 33.86-petaflop calculating Tianhe-2. Once completed, the AIBC will be the fastest in the world as well as be almost 10-times faster than Japan’s current fastest supercomputer, which runs at just 13.5-petaflops. “As far as we know, there is nothing out there that is as fast ,” Satoshi Sekiguchi, a director general at National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), told Reuters. In case you are interested, here is a list of the top-five supercomputers in the world: Sunway TaihuLight 93.01-petaflops (China) NUDT Tianhe-2 33.86-petaflops (China) Cray Titan 17.59-petaflops (U.S.) IBM Sequoia 17.17-petaflops (U.S.) Cray Cory 14.01-petaflops (U.S.) Fujitsu Oakforest-PACS 13.55-petaflops (Japan) Fujitsu K computer 10.51-petaflops (Japan) Cray Piz Daint 9.77-petaflops (Sweden) IBM Mira 8.58-petaflops (U.S.) Cray Trinity 8.10-petaflops (U.S.) The cost of the new computer is likely be mitigated by allowing companies to rent time on the supercomputer for their own use.  The announcement of the supercomputer comes after Japanese PM Shinzo Abe called for Japan’s governmental and private sectors to work more closely together to put the country at the forefront of new and growing technological markets. AIBC will be utilised to help research and development of self-driving cars, medical applications, robotics, and more. The primary goal however will be to calculate the capacity of the supercomputer to accelerate aspects of artificial intelligence research, including deep learning which will teach machines high-level abstract thinking like of a human being. While major tech companies are bidding to create this machine, there are a number of technical challenges to overcome in order to create the AIBC. Power will be one of the biggest hurdles as the AIST wants the computer to run on less than 3 megawatts of power which is five-times less than the current fastest. There is also a plan to use cutting-edge liquid cooling techniques to maintain the temperature of supercomputer.