<< A Japanese laboratory has built the world's fastest computer, a machine so powerful that it matches the raw processing power of the 20 fastest American computers combined and far outstrips the previous leader, an IBM-built machine.
The achievement, reported Friday by an American scientist who tracks the performance of the world's most powerful computers, is evidence that a technology race U.S. engineers have generally thought they were winning handily is far from over. American companies have built the fastest computers for most of the past decade.
The accomplishment is also a dramatic statement of contrasting scientific and technology priorities in the United States and Japan. The Japanese machine was built to analyze climate change, including global warming, as well as weather and earthquake patterns. The United States has predominantly focused its efforts on building powerful computers for simulating weapons.
The supercomputer was financed by the Japanese government and has been installed at the Earth Simulator Research and Development Center in Yokohama. The Japanese government has spent $350 million to $400 million developing the system during the past five years, said Akira Sekino, president of HNSX Supercomputers, an NEC subsidiary in Littleton, Colo. >>
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Apparently the computer has 640 specialized nodes, each having 5104 NEC CPU's :Q
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