Supercomputers – this is a badge of pride to wear by any country, if they managed to churn out the fastest supercomputer in the world. Needless to say, the mantle has changed many times over the previous years as new advancements in engineering and manufacturing are made, with the best brains of each country coming together to see who can cobble together the best and fastest supercomputer possible. The NVIDIA-powered Titan supercomputer was the fastest in the world at one point in time, and has since been superseded with the Tianhe-2 reigning supreme at the moment. Well, how about our friends down under, do they have a supercomputer to boast of?
The answer would be yes, with the Raijin debuting today to coincide with the opening of the National Computational Infrastructure (which so happens to be a high performance computing centre). Raijin is the god of thunder, lightning and storms in Japanese mythology, where it is capable of performing a similar number of calculations in an hour as seven billion people with calculators could – across the time span of 20 years. The speed of Raijin has been clocked at 1.2 petaflops, clearly biting the Tianhe-2’s dust at 33.86 petaflops. Still, this is a start to be proud of Down Under, don’t you think so? [Press Release]
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