Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry plans to spend 19.5 billion yen ($173 million) to build the world's fastest-known supercomputer.

This task, as a part of the government's policy to get back Japan's mojo in the world of technology, includes building a machine that can make 130 quadrillion calculations per second, or 130 petaflops in scientific parlance, as early as 2017, according to Reuters. With this project, Japan aims to beat the world's current fastest supercomputer, China's Sunway Taihulight, which is capable of 93 petaflops. One petaflop is one million billion floating-point operations per second.

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The computer is proposed to be built at Japan's ‎National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. "As far as we know, there is nothing out there that is as fast," said Satoshi Sekiguchi, the director general at the institute.

Japan's technological prowess has been dwindling since China overtook its position as the world's second-biggest economy. The country has lost its stand in many electronic fields thanks to the constant competition from South Korea and China.

According to PC World, apart from being the world's fastest, Japan claims the supercomputer will be the most efficient as well, consuming only 3 megawatts against China's Taihulight which consumes 15 megawatts.

Shinzo Abe, the Prime Minister of Japan, has called for companies, bureaucrats, and the political class to work closely together to take Japan to the top in all the fields where it has been losing the race, which includes robotics, batteries, renewable energy, and other markets. Additionally, the supercomputer will arm the country's manufacturers with an incredible platform for research that could help them in the areas of driverless cars (by allowing them to analyze huge troves of visual traffic data), robotics, medical diagnostics (by tapping medical records to develop new services and applications), and help factories improve automation. On the contrary, China uses the Sunway Taihulight only for weather forecasting, pharmaceutical research and industrial design, among other things.

The new supercomputer has been unofficially nicknamed ABCI which stands for AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure. Bidding for the project has already begun and is expected to end by Dec 8. Fujitsu Ltd, the company that built the fastest Japanese supercomputer - the Oakforest-PACS - which is capable of 13.6 petaflops, has declined to comment on whether it will bid for the project or not but it certainly has shown some interest in its development.  

Currently, Japanese corporations outsource data crunching work to foreign firms like Google and Microsoft. Japan intends to make the supercomputer available for a fee to such corporations.