A Japanese laboratory has built the world’s fastest computer, according to The New York Times (free registration required). The Japanese government invested US$350 million to $400 million over the last five years in developing the NEC supercomputer, which features 5,104 processors and is said to match the combined performance of the 20 fastest supercomputers in the U.S. The Japanese system occupies the equivalent area of four tennis courts and has achieved a computing speed of 35.6 trillion mathematical operations a second.