Riken has developed a supercomputer that it says achieves maximum theoretical performance of 1 petaflops (1,000 teraflops).

Its theoretical performance is nearly three times that of the top-ranked BlueGene/L installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The MDGrape-3 is expected to facilitate simulation of proteins’ molecular connections in a bid to shrink the development time for new drug therapies. In a broader sense, MDGrape-3 is expected to accelerate the advancement of nanometer-level life sciences.