Supercomputers - Japan is king, China's mad and hacks into Jap's systems

Really big calculators that conduct a myriad of scientific simulations for medical, astronomical, and other fields of science. The first article is about an older supercomputer that was upgrade to beat its own record and take the title from the current throneholder in China, and the second article is about the newest supercomputer which broke that record both developed by Japanese computer giant Fujitsu.

Nov 4
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-japan.html

The "K Computer", which has more than 88,000 central processing units -- the computer's "brain" -- compared with the fewer than four in the average desktop, smashed its own record of just over 8 quadrillion calculations during an experiment in October. A quadrillion is a thousand trillion.
Supercomputers operate roughly 10,000 times faster than ordinary personal computers.


Nov 8
PRIMEHPC FX10 supercomputer wins crown for Fujitsu
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-...n-fujitsu.html

That marked the displacement of China as having the number one position in supercomputers. This week’s supercomputer news from Fujitsu carries more record-breaking statistics. The PRIMEHPC FX10 made headlines in two directions: It's scaling up to 23.2 petaflops --more than double the current performance of the K computer. Also, rather than an undertaking for the Japanese government, as is the K computer for Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), the FX10 will be available commercially and outside Japan.

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Here is a wikipedia article that provides history and background of supercomputers.
Supercomputer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), and physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, and research into nuclear fusion).

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Here is the site that maintains a database of the top 500 supercomputers in the world. The list is updated every June and November and also goes into detail about the LINPACK benchmark.

http://www.top500.org/

From my understanding, and hopefully someone here can better explain it than me, the LINPACK benchmark is a measure of the supercomputer's ability to solve really complex math with each equation that could have the possibility of many variables at the fastest speed measured in millions of floating points operations per second (MFLOPS) or in the case of faster supercomputers of today which is a thousand trillion floating point operations per second (PETAFLOPS).

And if you interested in reading here is a super neat FAQ I found googling.
http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/Jac...l#_Toc27885709

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In an unrelated article that cannot be incidental. China isn't mentioned but I've read articles in the previous months that mentioned traces leading back to China. Cyberwarfare and cyberespionage is scary but awesome.

Nov 10
Cyber attacks hit Fujitsu local government system
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-...tsu-local.html

The online system, developed to enable local residents to request official certificates and documents on the Internet, was paralysed twice on Wednesday afternoon, a Fujitsu spokesman said.
The company, which investigated the cause of the defect, found the system had been overwhelmed by a massive flow of accesses released from abused IP addresses, Fujitsu spokesman Takashi Koto said.