South Korea To Spend Fiscal Funds To Develop Supercomputer Better Than AlphaGo

South Korea plans to spend over 100 billion won (USD87 billion) in fiscal funds for the next 10 years to develop supercomputers having a better capability than Google’s Go-playing computer program AlphaGo, the country’s ICT ministry said Monday.

About 10 billion won of fiscal funds will be invested annually in the next 10 years to develop supercomputers for artificial intelligence (AI), big data and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies, according to the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning.

The first state-run supercomputer development project in South Korea came as the 4-1 victory last month of AlphaGo over South Korean Go grandmaster Lee Se-dol at the Chinese board game Go raised needs for development of AI.

Under the state-level project, South Korea plans to develop a one-petaflop supercomputer by 2020, aiming to eventually produce a 30-petaflop computer by 2025.

A petaflop is a unit used in supercomputers to gauge a speed, in which a quadrillion digits can be processed per second.

A one-petaflop supercomputer is used in South Korea for public sectors such as predicting natural disasters, estimated to be three to five times faster in data processing than AlphaGo. (PNA/Xinhua) BNB/EBP