The move has left the project in disarray

May 21, 2009 10:53 GMT  ·  By
The NEC corporation has withdrawn from the RIKEN initiative of building the world's fastest supercomputer
   The NEC corporation has withdrawn from the RIKEN initiative of building the world's fastest supercomputer

IT companies NEC and Hitachi delivered a devastating blow to Japan's attempt at building the largest supercomputer in the world. The future machine, scheduled to begin operations next year, and to be completed by 2012, would have computed its data with both vector and scalar processors. If the initiative had been completed, it would have surpassed IBM's Roadrunner, the fastest supercomputer in the world, located at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, the US. At an estimated 9 petaflops, or 1015 floating point operations per second, Japan's new computational “monster” would have exceeded the Roadrunner's 1.71 petaflops capacity.

The NEC corporation announced that it withdrew from the project on account of the fact that it registered massive losses last year, in the amount of ¥300 billion ($3.1 billion). Additionally, management representatives said that they lacked the funds to bring the design of the computer to its manufacturing phase, even though they received more than ¥6 billion in funding from RIKEN, one of the largest natural sciences research institutes in Japan. The money was awarded to NEC and Hitachi for the design of a vector computing system.

This computer cluster was supposed to be designed in such a manner that it would have fitted together with the second major component of the supercomputer's core, the scalar processor currently under development by Fujitsu. The famed manufacturer also received a 6-billion-yen funding for its system, and officials from the company made no announcement yet as to whether they were going to leave the initiative too.

Mitsuo Yokokawa, the RIKEN team leader of the Next-Generation Supercomputer, at the R&D Center in Tokyo, said that the new machine was supposed to combine the best of the vectorial and scalar processing worlds, and that the new calculation behemoth could have been used to run the most complex simulations in the world, ranging from the expansion of the Universe and the formation of galaxies to ultra-complex climate change models, containing more variables than possible today.

Some voices now criticize the initiative for wanting to use vectorial computing in the first place, but managers defend themselves by saying that using a hybrid system would have increased the machine's performances, and would have also made it easier for science teams to run Earth-related simulations. Most of the computers are used for climate change modeling, or for inferring the movement of tectonic plates run on vectorial processors, and researchers are used to them, Nature News reports.