Fujitsu K, The 548,352-Core Supercomputer

This approachable perspex box is a section of the Fujitsu K. Despite looking like it should be selling Mars bars, cans of Coke, condoms and toothbrushes to businessmen, this cabinet makes up part of the current “world’s fastest supercomputer”.

It’s a multiple-core machine to say the least. The current version of the Fujitsu K consists of 672 cabinets, filled with 68,544 eight-core CPUs, capable of carrying out a total of 8.2 quadrillion calculations according to benchmarks. A quadrillion is… lots and lots. It’s also rated at 1.8162 petaflops. A Petaflop is “a thousand trillion floating point operations per second” so that’s also lots and lots.

This part of the Fujitsu K is currently on display at Japan’s CEATEC 2011 tech event. There’s no Wi-Fi card in it, so don’t bother trying to check your email on it. [Techradar]