Takumi Maruyama, head of Fujitsu's processor development department, has talked about the company's future plans to build a new supercomputer that could deliver a performance of 10 petaflops. The upcoming system is expected to be ready by early 2011 and will become the world's most powerful supercomputer, capable of delivering about 10 times the performance of today's fastest system. The machine Takumi Maruyama is speaking of is called the RIKEN and will be built for Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research.

Although there aren't many details available at this time, Takumi Maruyama says that the system will be built to take advantage of the company's next-generation Sparc64 VIIIfx processor. This new chip will boast an eight-core design and will come out as an update to the current four-core Sparc64 VII, which Fujitsu released two years ago. Each of the processor's cores is designed to work at clock speeds of 2GHz, combined with 5MB of L2 cache memory, for a performance of 128 Gflops, while consuming just 58 watts of power.

The RIKEN is due out in early 2011, round about the same time another supercomputer is expected to go online. IBM said that it planned to build a “petascale” supercomputer that would be based on the upcoming Power7 processor and would be used by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Said system is known as Blue Waters and could likely compete with Fujitsu's RIKEN.

The fastest computer system today has been designed by IBM and is known as the Roadrunner. It is used by the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory and is said to be capable of delivering a performance of 1.105 petaflops, according to the June Top500 list of supercomputers.