By John Oates, 22 April 2002 16:30
NEWS The world's fastest computer has been unveiled in Japan, and it's five times faster than IBM's quickest machine. The NEC Earth Simulator cost the Japanese government about $350m, and will be used for investigating climate change and earthquake patterns. The machine uses 5,104 processors, which allow it conduct 35.6 trillion calculations per second. It takes up the room of four tennis courts. Most US supercomputers use parallel processing - wiring lots of identical chips together to increase their power. The NEC machines use vectored processing - using specialised chips for different functions.
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