Japan's supercomputer K will retire in August to give way to a cutting-edge successor, government-backed research institute Riken said Wednesday.
The first supercomputer in the world to achieve a computing speed of over 10 quadrillion computations per second is set to end operations after nearly seven years and will be replaced by the successor, which is still under development, in around 2021 or 2022 at the same research center in Kobe.
The K went into full-scale operation in September 2012 after about six years of joint development by Riken and computer maker Fujitsu Ltd., at a cost of some ¥111 billion ($1 billion).