Japan plans to build the world’s fastest-known supercomputer in a bid to arm the country’s manufacturers with a platform for research that could help them develop and improve driverless cars, robotics, and medical diagnostics.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will spend 19.5 billion yen ($173 million) on the previously unreported project, a budget breakdown shows, as part of a government policy to get back Japan‘s mojo in the world of technology. The country has lost its edge in many electronic fields amid intensifying competition from South Korea and China, home to the world’s current best-performing machine.

In a move that is expected to vault Japan to the top of the supercomputing heap, its engineers will be tasked with building a machine that can make 130 quadrillion calculations per second – or 130 petaflops in scientific parlance – as early as next year, sources involved in the project told Reuters.

Japan's new machine will be used in the field of Artificial Intelligence, which explains its rather boring name: "AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure," or ABCI. Sekiguchi told Reuters that the system will also be used to "tap medical records to develop new services and applications."

dailytechinfo.org