By Michael Feldman, Managing Editor; Fujitsu is building what will be Japans floppiest supercomputer to date. On Tuesday, the company announced it received an order from the University of Tokyo and the University of Tsukuba for a 25 petaflop system, which will be used for scientific research and engineering. The supercomputer will be housed at the Joint Center for Advanced High-Performance Computing (JCAHPC) and is scheduled to be operational in December 2016.

By Peter ffoulkes; The world of quantum computing frequently seems as bizarre as the alternate realities created in Lewis Carrolls masterpieces Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

CELLE, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif.; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.— For the sixth consecutive time, Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, has retained its position as the world’s No. 1 system, according to the 46th edition of the twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Overall, change at the top of the list is again minor, with only two new systems in the Top 10 -- the Trinity supercomputer built by Cray and jointly deployed by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories, and the Hazel-Hen system built by Cray and installed …

FRANKFURT, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif.; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.— For the fifth consecutive time, Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, has retained its position as the world’s No. 1 system, according to the 45th edition of the twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Tianhe-2, which means Milky Way-2, led the list with a performance of 33.86 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark.

Quantum Computing has been a concept since the 1980s that has remained outside the domain of real-world high performance computing. Through the era of Moores Law and exponential progress in feature size, clock rates, and resulting performance, the need for alternative paradigms and technologies has attracted little attention or interest. But there has remained a curiosity among a limited community.

When the general public hears about the Human Brain Project (HBP), they immediately think about the possible medical breakthroughs the project will enable, like accelerated development of diagnostic tools and treatments for brain diseases or personalized medicine.

As the results of the 44th round of the Big Iron game of thrones are about to be announced, lets put this in context by taking a synoptic look at the historical data from the perspective of competition among nations.