A computer developed by Fujitsu and the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science has claimed the title of the world’s most powerful supercomputer on the Top500 list. The Fujitsu K Computer is a series of 672 computer racks with a total of 68,544 CPUs. The K Computer handles 8.162 petaflop/s (quadrillion floating point operations per second) as measured by the LINPACK benchmark. Researchers expect the final configuration of the K Computer to exceed 10 petaflop/s. The supercomputer it bumped from the top spot, the Tianhe-1A supercomputer at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China, performs 2.6 petaflop/s.
The K Computer got its name from the Japanese Kanji letter “Kei” which means ten peta or 10 to the 16th power. The logo for the K computer is based on the Japanese letter for Kei.
