Japan is building a super-fast computer, the first of its kind, which will be 1,000 times faster than any computer we have. It will be ready for use in 2030 and could cost more than $780 million to build. This new computer will help Japan stay ahead in developing artificial intelligence (AI).
According to Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), development of a successor to the country’s flagship supercomputer, Fugaku, will begin in 2025. The supercomputer can achieve speeds on the zettaflops scale, which has never been achieved before.
according to Live Science, “Floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) are used to measure how fast computers can solve problems — where a floating-point operation is a single calculation. A supercomputer with a speed of 1 zetaFLOPS can perform a sextillion (1 followed by 21 zeros) calculations per second. Today’s most powerful supercomputers have just broken the exaFLOPS barrier, meaning they can perform a little over a quintillion (1 followed by 18 zeros) calculations per second.”
The decision to build such a powerful machine was taken “to keep pace with the development of scientific research using artificial intelligence,” Japanese news site Nikkei said in a translated article.
according to ScienceAlert, Supercomputers have proven increasingly useful to scientists, helping researchers simulate black holes, discover new materials, model the Earth’s future, and investigate the foundations of mathematics. As these machines continue to become more powerful, we should see their capabilities expand as well. Unlike quantum computers, supercomputers aren’t much different from the desktops and laptops we all use every day; they’ve simply been scaled to incredibly high levels. They’re still based on processors, memory, and storage, but taken to the extreme.
An advanced zeta-class machine can be trained on more data at a faster rate and produce results that are more detailed, more accurate, and more comprehensive. If all goes well, six years from now, there should be a new supercomputer standard.