Fujitsu Ltd. said supercomputers will become a billion-dollar business for the company within five years, challenging products made by Hewlett-Packard Co. and International Business Machines Corp.
Japan’s biggest computer-services provider aims to control 10 percent of the market for the machines, from the current 2.2 percent, by tapping rising demand in Germany, France and the U.K., Masahiko Yamada, president of Fujitsu’s technical computing solutions unit, said in an interview in Tokyo.
Supercomputers, used to map the human genome, forecast weather patterns and track nuclear arsenals, are increasingly being employed by companies to design products such as cars and aircraft, research new drugs and develop financial trading strategies. Sales of the machines are estimated to grow 8.6 percent annually over the three years to 2012, four times faster than sales of conventional servers, according to Fujitsu.
“Manufacturers are using these tools to become more competitive,” Yamada said. Fujitsu has sold supercomputers with as many as 2,600 processors to auto and precision-equipment makers, he said, declining to identify any. “The day isn’t that far off when things like cars or cell phones will be designed from beginning to end inside a computer.”
Palo Alto, California-based Hewlett-Packard, the world’s biggest PC maker, leads the market for supercomputers with a 42 percent share, according to supercomputer-ranking website Top500. IBM has 37 percent of the world market.
World’s Fastest Supercomputer
Fujitsu, the only Japanese company still developing supercomputers after NEC Corp. and Hitachi Ltd. dropped out of the business last year, is building what it says will be the world’s fastest computer when completed in 2012 at Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research near Osaka.
The machine, the size of half a soccer field, will string together 80,000 processers and be able to perform 10 quadrillion calculations in a second, more than four times as many as the current record holder.
Fujitsu forecasts overall sales will rise 2.6 percent to 4.8 trillion yen ($52 billion) in the 12 months ending March 31, the first increase since the year ending March 2008. Its shares have fallen 2.2 percent this year, while Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 Stock Average has slipped 7.6 percent. The company shares dropped 0.3 percent to 583 yen as of the 11 a.m. trading break on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
“Supercomputers are to the information technology world, what F1 racing is to automakers,” said Makoto Taiji, a computer- science professor at Japan’s Riken Institute, in Saitama prefecture, north of Tokyo, where he leads a team that uses computers to simulate molecular interactions.“Companies use them to showcase what they can do technically, and in the end, it feeds into everyday products.”
In 2009 Fujitsu acquired Siemens AG’s 50 percent stake in their computer-making venture, Maarssen, Netherlands-based Fujitsu Siemens Computers Holding BV.
source: businessweek.com
