It would be the world's first 'zetta-class' supercomputer.
Japan is building a super-fast computer, the first of its kind, that will be 1,000 times faster than any computer we have today. It will be ready for use in 2030 and could cost more than $780 million to make. This new computer will help Japan stay at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI).
According to Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), development of a successor to Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer will begin in 2025. The supercomputer could reach speeds on the zetaFLOPS scale, something never before achieved.
According to Living science, “Floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) is a measure of how fast computers can solve problems, where one floating-point operation is one calculation. A supercomputer with a speed of 1 zetaFLOPS can perform one sextillion (1 followed by 21 zeros) calculations per second. Today's most powerful supercomputers have only just broken the exaFLOPS barrier, meaning they can perform just over one quintillion (1 followed by 18 zeros) calculations per second.”
Japanese news site Nikkei reported in a translated article that the decision to create such a powerful machine was made “to keep pace with the development of scientific research using artificial intelligence.”
According to ScienceAlert, Supercomputers have proven to be useful to scientists throughout history, helping researchers simulate black holes, discover new materials, model the future of the Earth, and explore the foundations of mathematics. As these machines become more powerful, we should see their capabilities increase. Unlike quantum computers, supercomputers aren’t all that different from the desktops and laptops we all use every day; they’ve just been scaled up to an incredibly high level. They’re still based on processors, memory, and storage, but taken to the extreme.
An upgraded zetta-class machine could be trained on more data at higher speeds, producing results that are more detailed, accurate, and comprehensive. If all goes well, a new supercomputing standard could be in place in six years.
