Japan is gearing up to take its technological achievements up a notch by developing world’s fastest supercomputer. Expected to be ready by 2017, the superefficient computer plan is a part of the government’s policy that aims at helping Japan regain its position in the world as a technology giant at a time when the country is facing stiff competition from China and South Korea. The supercomputer project aims at providing the manufacturers in the country with a platform that will facilitate research in the fields of robotics, driverless cars and medical diagnostics, says a report. Japanese engineers will build a machine with a processing capacity of 130 petaflops by the end of 2017 to push Japan’s ranking in the world of supercomputers to the top slot. If the project turns out to be successful, then Japan’s superfast computer will outperform China’s Sunway Taihu Light which is capable of 93 petaflops. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has called for companies, bureaucrats and the political class to work more closely together so that Japan can win in robotics, batteries, renewable energy and other new and growing markets. A supercomputer is a computer with a high-level computational capacity compared to a general-purpose computer. Performance of a supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second instead of million instructions per second.