Japanese 'K computer' is world's fastest

HAMBURG, Germany, June 22 (UPI) -- A computer developed by two Japanese companies is the fastest in the world, attendees at the 26th International Supercomputing Conference in Germany heard.

The "K computer" system, developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu, has 672 computer racks equipped with a total of 68,544 CPUs and has a calculation speed of 8.162 petaflops, a release from the companies said Wednesday.

A petaflop is a quadrillion floating-point operations per second.

Although only half completed, the system measured the fastest in the TOP500 ranking of the world's supercomputers, a ranking updated twice a year in June and November.

When configuration of the computer is complete in 2012, it is designed to achieve a performance of 10 petaflops.

It will available for use in a variety of computational science fields including global climate research, meteorology, disaster prevention and medicine, the companies said.