TOKYO (voa) – A laboratory in Japan reportedly has assembled the world’s fastest computer, a machine so powerful that it is said to equal the combined power of the 20 fastest computers in the United States.
An American scientist who tracks the performance of the world’s most powerful computers first reported details of the Japanese super-computer Friday. The New York Times says the Japanese machine was built to analyze climate change, including global warming, as well as weather and earthquake patterns.
The newspaper says “the United States has predominantly focused its efforts on building powerful computers for simulating weapons, while its efforts have lagged in scientific areas like climate modeling.”
The new super-computer has been under development at a research center in Yokohama for the past five years. The Japanese government reportedly spent up to $400 million on the project. The machine is said to have reached a computing speed of over 35-trillion (35-million-million) mathematical operations each second.
The fastest American super-computer now in operation, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, has a top speed of 7 trillion operations a second.
Japanese scientists intend to use the new super-computer to create a “virtual Earth”, a massive simulation to show what our entire planet would look like under various climate conditions. The system reportedly will be available to international researchers.
