Editor’s note: last summer, I was kindly invited to contribute to a book called ‘Faster than the future’, commissioned by the Digital Future Society, a programme supported by the Government of Spain in collaboration with Mobile World Capital Barcelona that seeks to ‘build an inclusive, equitable and sustainable future in the digital era’.

I wrote a chapter on ‘supercomputing’, also known as high-performance computing, and now that the book is out – download it for free here – I’m sharing it on Tech.eu in three parts, slightly updated with the latest news/information gathered since the initial write-up. Below, you can find the first part of the series.

Japan is home to one of the most famous mountains in the world; Mount Fuji, located on the island of Honshū. Commonly used as a cultural icon of Japan, it was not much of a