Jun 13, 2007, 5:47 GMT
Tokyo - The Japanese government research institute Riken has appointed Hitachi Ltd, NEC Corp and Fujitsu Ltd to jointly develop the world's fastest computer by March 2009.
The institute reported the names of companies as the co-developers of Japan's next-generation super-computer to the education ministry Wednesday, an NEC spokesman said.
The three companies are to design the super-computer on a budget of 115.4 billion yen (948.08 million dollars) to be able to compute at 10,000 trillion floating point operations per second, according to Jiji Press.
Japan aims to regain the title as the owner of the world's fastest super-computer after the United States snatched it in 2004.
In 2004, the NEC-made Earth Simulator was overtaken as the world's fastest supercomputer by the Blue Gene/L system developed by US computer giant International Business Machines Corp.
The new supercomputer, which would be installed at a facility in western Japanese city of Kobe, is expected to serve mainly academic and corporate researchers in research fields such as nanotechnology and life science.
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