Japan operates a number of centers for supercomputing which hold world records in speed, with the K computer becoming the world's fastest in June 2011. and Fugaku took the lead in June 2020, and furthered it, as of November 2020, to 3 times faster than number two computer. The K computer's performance was impressive, according to professor Jack Dongarra who maintains the TOP500 list of supercomputers, and it surpassed its next 5 competitors combined. The K computer cost US$10 million a year to operate. Previous records Japan's entry into supercomputing began in the early 1980s. In 1982, Osaka University's LINKS-1 Computer Graphics System used a massively parallel processing architecture, with 514 microprocessors, including 257 Zilog Z8001 control processors and 257 iAPX 86/20 floating-point processors. It was mainly used for rendering realistic 3D computer graphics. It was the world's most powerful computer, as of 1984. The SX-3 supercomputer family was developed by NEC Corporation and announced in April 1989. The SX-3/44R became the fastest supercomputer in the world in 1990. Fujitsu's Numerical Wind Tunnel supercomputer gained the top spot in 1993. Japanese supercomputers continued to top the TOP500 lists up until 1997. The K computer's placement on the top spot was seven years after Japan held the title in 2004. NEC's Earth Simulator supercomputer built by NEC at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) was the fastest in the world at that time. It used 5,120 NEC SX-6i processors, generating a performance of 28,293,540 MIPS (million instructions per second). It also had a peak performance of 131 TFLOPS (131 trillion floating-point operations per second), using proprietary vector processing chips. The K computer used over 60,000 commercial scalar SPARC64 VIIIfx processors housed in over 600 cabinets. The fact that K computer was over 60 times faster than the Earth Simulator, and that the Earth Simulator ranked as the 68th system in the world 7 years after holding the top spot, demonstrates both the rapid increase in top performance in Japan and the widespread growth of supercomputing technology worldwide. Supercomputing centers The GSIC Center at the Tokyo Institute of Technology houses the Tsubame 2.0 supercomputer, which has a peak of 2,288 TFLOPS and in June 2011 ranked 5th in the world. It was developed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in collaboration with NEC and HP, and has 1,400 nodes using both HP Proliant and NVIDIA Tesla processors. The RIKEN