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World’s Fastest Computer

Scheduled to be officially displayed at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg today, a Japanese super-computer has grabbed the title of world's fastest computer.

The K Computer, built by Fujitsu, is based at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan and leaves previous records for the world's fastest computer in the dust with a processing power of more than 8 petaflop per second (that's 8 quadrillion calculations per second!) -- three times faster than its closest competitor located in the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China. The United States takes the bronze, with a super computer owned by the US Department of Energy and housed in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The K Computer contains more than 80,000 2GHz SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs (with eight cores each), to deliver a total of more than 640,000 combined processing cores. The world's fastest computer also consumes a ton of power -- a massive 9.89 megawatts. Given its gigantic processing output however, it still manages to be the fourth most energy-efficient system in the list of the worlds 500 fastest computers. In June 2008, the Roadrunner from the US Los Alamos National Laboratory broke the peta-flop processing barrier for the first time. It now resides in tenth place, as American super-computer begins to fall behind the speed of research and technology in Asia.