* Astronomy

Japan has unveiled their fastest supercomputer. Assembled from Hitachi and IBM components, the new system sports total performance around 59 trillion calculations per second and comes at a cool 5-year lease price of $30 million.

KEK the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Ibaraki prefecture has installed the system for studies on high-energy accelerator science such as elementary particle physics and nuclear physics. KEK concluded a contract with the two companies to lease the system over a five-year period for about 3.5 billion yen.
The institute will ask the public to propose specific themes of research activities using the supercomputer system.

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