Japan plans to build the world’s fastest supercomputer in a bid to arm the country’s manufacturers with a platform for research that could help them develop and improve driverless cars, robotics and medical diagnostics.
The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is to spend ¥19.5 billion (US$172.6 million) on the previously unreported project, a budget breakdown shows, as part of a government policy to get Japan’s mojo back in the world of technology.
In a move that is expected to vault Japan to the top of the supercomputing heap, its engineers are to be tasked with building a machine that can make 130 quadrillion calculations per second — or 130 petaflops in scientific parlance — as early as next year, sources involved in the project told reporters.
At that speed, Japan’s computer would be ahead of China’s Sunway TaihuLight, which is capable of 93 petaflops.
“As far as we know, there is nothing out there that is as fast,” said Satoshi Sekiguchi, a director-general at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, where the supercomputer is to be built.
The push to return to the vanguard comes at a time of growing nostalgia for the heyday of Japanese technological prowess, which has dwindled since China overtook Japan as the world’s second-biggest economy.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has called for companies, bureaucrats and the political class to work more closely together so Japan can win in robotics, batteries, renewable energy and other new and growing markets.
In the area of supercomputing, Japan’s aim is to use ultrafast calculations to accelerate advances in artificial intelligence (AI), such as “deep learning” technology that works off algorithms that mimic the human brain’s neural pathways, to help computers perform new tasks and analyze scores of data.
Recent achievements in this area have come from Google DeepMind AI program AlphaGo, which in March beat South Korean professional player Lee Se-dol in the ancient board game of Go.
Applications include helping companies improve driverless vehicles by allowing them to analyze huge troves of visual traffic data, or it could help factories improve automation.
China uses Sunway TaihuLight for weather forecasting, pharmaceutical research and industrial design, among other things.
Japan’s new supercomputer could help tap medical records to develop new services and applications, Sekiguchi said.
The supercomputer is to be made available for a fee to Japan’s corporations, who now outsource data crunching to foreign firms such as Google and Microsoft Corp, Sekiguchi and others involved in the project said.
The new computer has been dubbed ABCI, an acronym for AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure. Bidding for the project has begun and is to close on Dec. 8.
Fujitsu Ltd, the builder of the fastest Japanese supercomputer to date — Oakforest-PACS, capable of 13.6 petaflops — declined to say if it would bid for the project.
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