Kyoto University, one of Japan’s leading research institutes, accidentally destroyed 77 terabytes of data during a simple backup process after its supercomputer system; He lost most of his student research projects.
The system failure, which occurred between December 14 and 16, erased approximately 34 million files belonging to 14 different research groups that used Hewlett-Packard’s university-based supercomputer. The University of Kyoto concluded that the data from the four research groups could not be recovered at all and had been lost forever.
It is not yet clear what type of files belong to which field of research have been deleted, or exactly what caused the error in the backup process of this supercomputer. Aside from the lost data, doing supercomputing is by no means cheap, and an hour of working with it costs hundreds of dollars for each research group.
Supercomputing is very popular among research teams due to its very high speed of information processing and the ability to use several computer systems in parallel to solve very complex mathematical calculations. The superiority of supercomputers over classical computers has made them a valuable tool for research and study in a wide range of fields, including climate modeling, physics, and vaccine production.
Japan currently has the world’s most powerful supercomputer, the Fugaku, developed in collaboration with the Japan Scientific Research Institute (RIKEN) and Fujitsu. With a 48-core A64FX processor and 442 petaflops of power, the Fugako uses almost three times the processing power of an IBM Summit supercomputer. Fugaku cost $ 1.2 billion to build and has so far been used for research on the corona virus, particularly in the field of diagnosis, treatment and simulation of virus spread.
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