Japan is building a super-fast computer, the first of its kind, that will be 1,000 times faster than any computer we have now. It will be ready to use in 2030 and could cost over $780 million to make. This new computer will help Japan stay ahead in developing artificial intelligence (AI).

According to Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT), development of a successor to the country’s flagship supercomputer, Fugaku, will begin in 2025. The supercomputer could reach speeds on a zetaFLOPS scale, which has never been achieved before.

According to Live Science, “Floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) is used to measure how fast computers can solve problems-where one floating-point operation is a single calculation. A supercomputer with a speed of 1 zetaFLOPS could make one sextillion (1 followed by 21 zeros) calculations per second. Today’s most powerful supercomputers have only just broken the exaFLOPS barrier, meaning they can make just over one quintillion (1 followed by 18 zeros) calculations per second.”

The Japanese news site Nikkei stated in a translated article that the decision to create such a powerful machine was taken “in order to keep up with the development of scientific research using artificial intelligence.”

According to ScienceAlert, supercomputers have proved consistently useful to scientists, helping researchers simulate black holes, discover new materials, model Earth’s future, and probe the foundations of mathematics. As these machines continue to get more powerful, we should see their capabilities expand too.Unlike quantum computers, supercomputers aren’t too different from the desktops and laptops we all use every day; they’re just scaled up to an incredibly high level. They’re still based on processors, memory, and storage, but taken to extremes.

An upgraded zetta-class machine could be trained on more data at a faster speed and produce results that are more detailed, more accurate, and more comprehensive. If all goes well, six years from now, there should be a new supercomputer standard.

Geneva, Switzerland:

Switzerland on Saturday inaugurated its new supercomputer called Alps — one of the world’s fastest — which it hopes will help place the country first for trustworthy artificial intelligence solutions.

The ETH Zurich University officially inaugurated Alps at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Lugano, southern Switzerland.

“Alps is an expression of our vision of a future characterised by knowledge and progress,” Economy, Education and Research Minister Guy Parmelin said in a speech at the CSCS site.

In June, Alps was ranked as the world’s sixth most powerful supercomputer. However, at the time it was not fully constructed and had only reached 60 per cent of its potential.

The supercomputer was developed to meet extreme data and computing scientific requirements and allows artificial intelligence to be utilised more fully.

It is the central part of an initiative “to position Switzerland as the world’s leading hub for the development and implementation of transparent and trustworthy AI solutions”, ETH Zurich said in a statement.

Andreas Krause, head of the AI Centre at ETH Zurich, said: “Alps makes it possible to train complex AI models for important applications, for example, in medicine and climate research.”

The MeteoSwiss national weather service is already using the Alps to produce a higher-resolution weather prediction model that better reflects Switzerland’s complex topography of mountains and valleys.

Parmelin said on X that the Alps would be “opening new horizons, clearing the path for the future, placing Switzerland in pole position for scientific research”.

CSCS deputy director Michele De Lorenzi told Switzerland’s Keystone-ATS news agency it would take 40,000 years for a commercial laptop to perform the operations that the Alps can do in a day.

The supercomputer is housed in 33 cabinets covering 116 square metres.

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