Tokyo prosecutors on Tuesday arrested the president of a tech venture that develops the world’s fourth-fastest supercomputer on suspicion of defrauding a government institution of ¥431 million ($3.8 million) in subsidies.
The special investigation squad of the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor’s Office also arrested another official in connection with the case in the raid on the Tokyo headquarters of PEZY Computing, which was part of the team that developed the “Gyoukou” supercomputer.
According to the prosecutors, President Motoaki Saito, 49, and Daisuke Suzuki, 47, are suspected of illegally receiving the subsidies from the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization after padding expenses for the venture firm’s technological development.
In November, Gyoukou was ranked fourth among the world’s fastest supercomputer after achieving 19.14 petaflops, or calculating 19,000 trillion times per second.
Saito has earned fame both at home and abroad for advocating the need for more technologically advanced supercomputers. He is known as a pioneer for his miniaturization of energy-saving supercomputers, and has expressed an eagerness to develop the technology, saying he aimed to be the best, not second best.
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This nonsense of developing the fastest supercomputer should stop.
These are expensive white elephants that are technologically obsolete within a decade.
I remember attending a meeting a year before the completion of the K-computer in which scientists were encouraged to submit ideas on how to use the damn thing, and the only ideas that came forward from the supporting team was doing calculations on the aerodynamics of F1 cars. Currently the K-computer is said to be used for better purposes, but I am not convinced that it wouldn't have been better to do the computations with state-of-the-art GPGPU servers.
