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13 Dec 16. Japan Aims For No.1 Supercomputer In 2017. Japan plans to build a super-efficient computer that could vault it to the top of the world’s supercomputer rankings by the end of next year. With a processing capacity of 130 petaflops, the planned computer would outperform the current world leader, China’s Sunway TaihuLight, which delivers 93 petaflops. One petaflop is one million billion floating-point operations per second.
Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) isn’t just aiming to build the world’s fastest supercomputers, it also wants to make one of the most efficient. It is aiming for a power consumption of under 3 megawatts, a staggering figure, given that Japan’s current highest entry in the Top500 supercomputer list, Oakforest-PACS, delivers one-tenth the performance (13.6 petaflops) for the same power. TaihuLight consumes over 15 MW.
AIST is also aiming for a power usage effectiveness (the ratio of total power consumption, including that required for cooling, to power consumed by computing devices) of under 1.1. That’s a PUE value attained only by the world’s most efficient data centers.
The institute plans to use liquid cooling, a technique also being used by French company Atos in its supercomputer design for the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). Atos is aiming for a performance one exaflop (one billion billion flops) but won’t have its computer ready until 2020, while AIST expects its machine to be completed a year from now.
Where other countries have optimised their top supercomputers for calculations such as atmospheric modeling or nuclear weapon simulations, AIST is targeting machine learning and deep learning applications in the growing field of artificial intelligence (AI) with the new computer design.
The project carries the name AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI), and is intended for use by startups, existing industrial supercomputing users and academia, according to a document published by AIST in November. ABCI will be built at the University of Tokyo’s Kashiwa Campus. (Source: Cyber Security Intelligence/Computerworld)
09 Dec 16. US Navy strengthens ship-based electronic warfare. The service is now in the process of upgrading its existing SLQ-32 Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program, or SEWIP — an electronic warfare sensor now on many guided missile cruisers and destroyers.
SEWIP is designed to detect approaching threats, such as anti-ship cruise missiles, in time for ship commanders to take defensive or protective actions. It is configured to provide early detection, signal analysis and threat warnings against a range of threats.
While much of the work on SEWIP is being done by large defense firms such as Northrop Grumman, the Navy recently awarded a $7m deal to Virginia-based NexGen for procurement of an element of SEWIP called AN/SSX-1 Specific Emitter Identification System.
The SLQ-32 is a little panel that looks like an old electronic TV set with panels on the front. Navy developers have explained that certain countries on the Eurasian land mass are building weapons that a SLQ-32 will not detect.
Cruisers and destroyers unable to recognize approaching threats will be unable to deploy defensive measures such as decoys, service officials said.
The Navy needs to upgrade electronic warfare technology faster on more of its surface ships because potential enemies are developing weapons designed to penetrate defensive systems on many U.S. cruisers and destroyers, service leaders said.
While Navy officials have not specified countries or provided details regarding these new weapons, they did say they were being engineered as multi-seeker weapons coming in at supersonic speed.
Following the initial current SEWIP Block 2 upgrade, the Navy plans to develop and acquire a Bloc