Japan Catching Up With U.S. in the Race Over High-Speed Computers
Sequestered inside a well-guarded compound on the edge of Tokyo, Mikio Watanabe’s SX-2 supercomputer cuts a singularly unimpressive figure.
For starters, it is bulky and gray, with all the visual appeal of a filing cabinet.
Watanabe, an engineer at NEC laboratory here who has spent every working moment for the last seven years on this numerical Goliath, senses his visitor’s disappointment.
“OK, comparisons speak for themselves,” he says. Out comes a scrap of poster board covered with numbers comparing the performance of the SX-2 with its Japanese and American competitors. It reads like a paean to the SX-2.
Fastest in World
“This,” Watanabe announces with unconcealed pride, “is the fastest computer in the world.”
In the race to develop ultra-high speed computers, Japan doesn’t plan to be left in the dust.
Five years ago, the supercomputer field was primarily the stomping ground of Cray Research, an American firm. Then Japan launched its national superspeed computer project. In the ensuing three years, Japan has narrowed much of the lead the United States built over the last 15 years.
Japan now boasts the world’s fastest computer, capable of executing 1.3 billion separate calculations each second. Its production and marketing know-how has helped poise the market at the edge of decisive expansion. U.S. technological supremacy in this field is being challenged for the first time.
“The era of playing catch-up is ending,” says Genya Chiba, research director of National Research & Development, one of the government research organizations included under the national supercomputer project’s umbrella. “Now we are the ones to be caught up with.”
Effect of Largess
Super-computers are the Arabian steeds of the information-processing industry. They are expensive--$5 million to $15 million apiece--and fast. As a result, both in terms of manufacturers and clientele, the world supercomputing market became a highly exclusive club. A corporate duopoly comprised of Control Data and Cray Research dominated the field from its early days in the 1970s. From the first, its best customer was the U.S. government.
“The supercomputing industry in the U.S. was nurtured by the largess of DOD (U.S. Department of Defense) and DOE (Department of Energy),” says George Lindamood, a technology watcher in Tokyo for Burroughs.
Since supercomputers were being used for highly specific tasks, there seemed to be no need to compromise their performance by designing them to work with the general-purpose mainframe computers employed by many large businesses. So Cray and Control Data produced highly specialized machines for a narrow little market that few other manufacturers appeared interested in.
Enter Japan. Through its computer manufacturers, it is instigating a wholesale transformation of the industry. Their thrust in the field is based on the conviction that virtually all the industries critical to its economic future--among them biotechnology, semiconductor development and aerospace science--will increasingly demand the sort of computing power that only supercomputers can provide.
“Supercomputers will become the workhorses of the ‘90s,” says Shoji Tanaka, a University of Tokyo semiconductor physicist who helped launch his country’s drive to catch up with Western semiconductor technology in the 1970s.
The Japanese also see supercomputers as the guinea pigs on which future generations of computer devices will be tested. Faster computers will require faster electronic circuitry attainable only through the development of new microelectronic technologies. So not only will the actual computing power of supercomputers prove vital to the design of advanced microcircuits, explains Fujitsu’s supercomputer project leader, Hiroshi Uchida, but “their very existence will help extend the state of the art.”
New Type of Contestant
Japan is also bringing a new type of corporate contestant into the race. Unlike the U.S. firm Cray Research, the Japanese companies--Fujitsu, Hitachi and NEC--are all multifaceted electronics companies. Each boasts its own line of computers, from personal-sized machines to big mainframe computers. And each is among the world’s top 10 semiconductor manufacturers.
At the same time, they have embarked on a global strategy to take advantage of IBM’s absence from the supercomputing market. Fujitsu and Hitachi have designed their machines to be compatible with IBM equipment--meaning that users of the Japanese computers can therefore move to more powerful machines without the trouble and expense of adapting to a special system.
Shadowing the efforts of the three supercomputer manufacturers is the national supercomputer project itself. This combines the efforts of six major Japanese semiconductor manufacturers--including the three supercomputer manufacturers--with the Ministry of International Trade and Industry’s Electrotechnical Laboratory. The project was begun in 1981, is scheduled to last nine years and has a budget--to be supplemented by the six semiconductor companies--of 23 billion yen (about $90.4 million).
10 Billion Per Second
All this effort is supposed to result in a machine that can carry out roughly 10 billion operations per second over a sustained period. That is seven times faster than the SX-2’s peak operating speed and at least 10 times faster than the best American equipment currently available. At the same time, the Japanese hope to have made pioneering strides in other areas, including computer architecture and semiconductor design.
The effort itself has drawn a large amount of attention. The U.S. government takes the Japanese push into supercomputers so seriously that it was among the items discussed by President Reagan and Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone in Los Angeles in January.
Once, U.S. supercomputer technology was kept from France for the development of its nuclear program. Security restrictions to keep supercomputer technology from falling into Communist-bloc hands were many.
Now, as the latest developments in this technology are being bandied about by a few dozen parties, some U.S. defense experts reportedly fear a “strategic threat.”
Of course, Japanese policy makers say they don’t see their efforts as a strategic threat. Japan, a nation with few natural resources, considers itself to be more dependent on information technologies. Thus, supercomputing is seen as a logical extension of the country’s existing computer prowess.
Well Positioned
“World domination is not among our goals,” promises NEC chairman Koji Kobayashi. Indeed, observers here scoff at the notion that any single company or nation could come to dominate something so vast and multifaceted as what they expect the supercomputing industry to become.
Analysts agree that as the market expands, Japanese companies should be nicely positioned for growth. Some estimates predict that Japan’s share of the supercomputer market could increase to 50% by 1990.
