12 of these procurements were done in a special government program to strengthen Japanese applied supercomputer research mainly in the areas of biology and medicine, computer science, communications, chemistry, and materials science. More than 250 million US-Dollars were spent for supercomputers by the Japanese government in this program. In addition to this special program, government and industry continued to fund 28 new installations or upgrades in the course of regular procurement cycles.
Japanese supercomputers tend to be very powerful systems.
One reason for this is that the budget for each procurement is rather big, often 20 million US-Dollar and more. The other reason is that the Japanese users and manufacturers continue to rely on vector processing technologies with a very high single processor performance. Rmax performance installed worldwide. As stated in the description of the Linpack benchmark, this benchmark does not reflect the overall performance of a given computer system. It does, however, give the performance of a computer system dedicated to the task of solving a dense system of equations which has been adjusted in size to give the best performance with the optimal algorithm chosen by the vendor.