Toasted Dolphin

Japan is reportedly planning to build a 130-petaflops supercomputer costing $173 million (£131 million) that is due for completion next year.

According to the Top 500 site listing the world's fastest computers, the current number-crunching champ is China's 93-petaflops Sunway TaihuLight, followed by its Tianhe-2, coming in at 34 petaflops. Japan's most powerful system at the moment is a 13.5 petaflops machine. Overall, Japan has the fourth-largest number of supercomputers in the Top 500 listing, after the US, China, and Germany.

top 500 list

Top US iat number 3, a Cray XK7 with 560,640 cores

3 DOE/SC/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
United States Titan - Cray XK7 , Opteron 6274 16C 2.200GHz, Cray Gemini interconnect, NVIDIA K20x
Cray Inc.

NSA Utah Data Center

The Cray XC30 is a massively parallel multiprocessor supercomputer manufactured by Cray. It consists of Intel Xeon processors, with optional Nvidia Tesla or Xeon Phi accelerators, connected together by Cray's proprietary "Aries" interconnect, stored in air-cooled or liquid-cooled cabinets. Each liquid-cooled cabinet can contain up to 48 blades, each with eight CPU sockets, and uses 90 kW of power. The XC series supercomputers are available with the Cray DataWarp applications I/O accelerator technology.