NEC withdraws from the development of the world's most advanced and best-performing "next generation supercomputer"

It was revealed that NEC will withdraw from the development of the world's most advanced and best-performing "next generation supercomputer" promoted by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

From the high international competitiveness of the supercomputer divisionTrade friction between Japan and the USIn addition, it achieved the world's best computing performance from 2002 to 2004 "Earth Simulator"It is likely that this withdrawal will have a major influence on the development of supercomputers in the future just because it is NEC, etc. who was involved in the development of.

Details are as below.
Review the composition of next generation supercomputer system | 2009 press release | RIKEN

According to the press release announced by RIKEN, we have been developing as part of the "development and utilization of state-of-the-art, high-performance general purpose supercomputer" project (next generation supercomputer project) promoted by MEXT It seems that he decided to review the system composition of generation supercomputer.

NEC received a proposal from NEC that "Next generation supercomputer, which has been pursuing development aiming at achievement of the world's highest performance, can not participate in the manufacturing stage," NEC said the global economic situation worsened He decided not to join the manufacturing stage of the next-generation supercomputer project.

In response to NEC's withdrawal, RIKEN will quickly compile a new system configuration based on the technical opinions obtained during the mid-evaluation process of the project undertaken by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

In addition, RIKEN and NEC will utilize the technology and know-how that we have cultivated in the project, and in future it will be closely related with collaboration between next generation supercomputer and universities and research institutions through application software instead of hardware, and research on computational system architecture It is said that we will continue our cooperative relationship.

Also, other than NEC,Fujitsu developed the world's fastest CPU "Venus"And Hitachi, Ltd., and is developing with the aim to operate the next generation supercomputer of the world's most advanced and the highest performance realizing 10 petaflops class computing performance in fiscal 2010.

This is the development process table before reviewing.


By the way, at the following link which summarizes the top 500 performance of the world's supercomputer, the current processing capacity top is "IBM Roadrunner".

Home | TOP 500 Supercomputing Sites
http://www.top500.org/


2009/05/14 20:16 Addendum
New release by NECaccording to,"NEC continues its supercomputer business"We announce it as follows.

NEC has been in charge of a part of system development as one of the jointly developed members at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology "Developing and using state-of-the-art, high-performance general purpose supercomputer" project (hereinafter called the next generation supercomputer project) However, with the completion of the detail design phase contract of the project, we will not make contracts for the subsequent production phases, and will focus on future high-speed computer architecture research, support for deployment of application software with other research institutions etc. I decided to contribute to the project.
In addition, NEC will continue to inherit and develop vector technology, and will continue to develop and provide state-of-the-art supercomputer systems.