A Cray XC50 supercomputer has been selected to provide complex calculations for nuclear fusion research in Japan.

The National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology’s (QST) Rokkasho Fusion Institute expects the new device to deliver peak performance of more than four petaflops, double that of the system it is replacing.

A petaflop enables one thousand million million operations per second.

It will be the largest supercomputer used specifically for plasma physics and fusion science in the country.

The machine will contribute to the ITER project, a worldwide collaboration designed to demonstrate the scientific feasibility of fusion power as a clean and sustainable energy source.

The system is expected to be put into production in 2018.