While Japan once dominated the electronics industry, recent years have seen the nation challenged by innovations from China and South Korea. Japan plans to change this by building the world’s fastest supercomputer, a record which has been held by China for the past seven years.
Dubbed ABCI (AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure), the supercomputer will be capable of 130 petaflops, compared to the Chinese Taihulight’s 93 petaflops. This will equate to 130 quadrillion calculations per second.
Japan intends to use these ultra-fast calculations to support advances in AI, such as deep learning technology. This is a bid to support the country’s manufacturers in advancing autonomous cars and robotics, as well as diagnostics for the medical industry.
The supercomputer will be made available to Japanese corporations, which currently outsource their data analytics to foreign firms.
It will cost US$173 million to develop, with the engineering process expected to begin as early as next year.