Supercomputers can perform 1,000 trillion calculations per second

Japan is preparing to start building the world's most powerful supercomputer , the first zetaFLOPS-class, at a cost of more than $750 million and operational by 2030.

Once fully operational, the machine will be 1,000 times faster than today's most powerful supercomputers, helping Japan catch up with the pace of artificial intelligence (AI) development. The plan to build the machine was announced by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports and Science (MEXT).

FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second) is a measure of a computer's computational performance, measured by the number of floating point calculations a computer can perform in one second.

A supercomputer with a speed of one zetaFLOPS can perform 1,000 billion billion calculations/second, while today's most powerful supercomputers can only perform one billion billion calculations/second, surpassing the exaFLOPS barrier.

The new supercomputer, tentatively named "Fugaku Next," will be built by Japanese companies RIKEN and Fujitsu, both of which were involved in the production of Fugaku (0.44 exaFLOPS), the world's fourth-fastest supercomputer.

One of the biggest challenges engineers face when building a new supercomputer is figuring out how to run it efficiently. By 2023, computer experts predict that a zeta-class machine using today’s supercomputer technology will require the same amount of energy as 21 nuclear power plants.

MEXT will spend about $29 million in the first year of the project, then allocate an additional $761 million over the course of the project, which is expected to be completed in 2030. By then, Fugaku Next could be the most powerful supercomputer on Earth.