Japan's NEC boasts world's most powerful computer Japan's NEC Corp. on Thursday announced the launch of what it called the world's most powerful supercomputer on the market, meant for advanced use in the sciences. Since the 1970s, major computer makers such as NEC, Fujitsu and Hitachi in Japan and IBM, Intel and SGI in the United States have been vying to build the most powerful computer, measured in terms of gigaflops and teraflops. NEC said that its latest supercomputer, called SX-9, is capable of calculating 839 teraflops -- or 839 trillion floating point operations per second. "The SX-9 has been...