Tokyo Institute of Technology Announces Massive New Supercomputer

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Watch out Watson, because the Tokyo University of Technology has a serious competitor breathing down your back–their computer, which doesn’t seem to have a name like Watson does, makes up for its lack of nomenclature by packing some serious firepower: 2.39 petaflops worth.

That’s so serious that it would put the Tokyo University of Technology’s new supercomputer second on the list of top five hundred supercomputers on Earth, wedged squarely between China’s Nebulae (2.98 petaflops) and the United States’ Jaguar (2.3 petaflops, both measures theoretical maximums). The list is updated twice a year so it’s basically in constant flux as new introductions show up, but right now, that’s the story.

In case that number doesn’t mean anything to you, “peta” is one step up from “tera”, which puts it somewhere in the ball park of a thousand teraflops. To further break it down, if we use hard drive storage–bytes–instead of flops (which in turn is short for FLoating OPerations, or basically, calculations), a one petabyte hard drive would have sufficient space to store, roughly, 250000 DVDs. For extra fun, to sit down and watch those 250000 DVDs, assuming no breaks to sleep or anything else, would require you to spend about forty three years watching.

Long story short, this is one of the biggest, most powerful, computers on the face of the earth. They expect it to be online this fall and built at a cost of 35 million dollars US, by both NEC and HP.