Japan Builds The World's Most Powerful Supercomputer (8.16 Petaflops)

Not only is it the worlds most powerful supercomputer with enough computational speed to beat the next five combined, but it is not yet fully completed. Japan took the top spot from China which is now in second, with the United States rounding out the top three.

http://news.techworld.com/data-centre/3286946/japan-builds-worlds-most-powerful-supercomputer

"A Japanese computer has taken first place on the Top 500 supercomputer list, ending China's reign at the top after just six months. At 8.16 petaflops, the K computer is more powerful than the next five systems combined.

The K computer's performance was measured using 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs each with eight cores, for a total of 548,352 cores, almost twice as many as any other system on the Top500 list. The computer is still under construction, and when it enters service in November 2012 will have more than 80,000 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs according to its manufacturer, Fujitsu.

Japan's ascension to the top means that the Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer, which took the number 1 position in November last year, is now in second spot with its 2.57 petaflops. But China continues to grow the number of systems it has on the list, up from 42 to 62 systems. The change at the top also means that Jaguar, built for the US Department of Energy (DOE), is bumped down to third place.
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When complete, it is intended to run at over 10 petaflops.

This is the first time Japan has had the most powerful supercomputer since the country's Earth Simulator was surpassed by the DOE's IBM BlueGene/L and by Nasa's Columbia in November 2004.

For the first time, all of the top 10 systems achieved performance over 1 petaflop, although they are the only systems on the list that reach that level. The US has five systems in the top 10, Japan and China have two each and France has one."