14 DAY TRIAL // Exascale supercomputers are the next big step in the HPC industry (high performance computing), and there's practically a race to see who'll get there first. Cray will probably manage it, but there are others hard at work, in this case RIKEN.
RIKEN claims to be “Japan's largest comprehensive research institution” and has been selected by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology to build an exascale supercomputer by 2020.
That means that it has seven years to create a high-performance computer with a performance that is 30 times better than China’s Tianhe-2 (the fastest supercomputer in the world right now, at 33.86 petaflop/s).
Thus, the RIKEN HPC will supposedly be capable of processing at least one quintillion (a million trillion) floating point operations per second.
It will also be 100 times faster than the K computer RIKEN made previously, the one that was the best in 2011.
Obviously, the Japanese government wants the corporation to put its already sharp skills to work and keep Japan in the top tech-savvy countries.
The RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) will continue to operate the K computer of course, and maybe upgrade it too.
Still, the new project will take up most of its time and resources, understandably enough. We don't know how large the final conglomerate will be compared to existing ones though.
Given the advances in cooling and the miniaturization of technology, as well as the growing capabilities of CPUs and PCI Express compute cards, RIKEN might manage to stay within regular space requirements.
It might still need to physically expand though. A performance rise by a factor of 30 more or less demands it, and the space efficiency of new-generation chips and coolers might not be enough to compensate for that. We'll have to wait and see what happens.