27 billion yen?! Wow, that makes my my computer look a bit low-end.

Ahh, bugger - is someone keeping a scorecard of all the stuff the DPJ are freezing or cancelling during their 仕分け investigations.

There must be a scorecard for jobs lost through all this plus cancelling Yamba dam, etc, etc. I have seen reports saying that a number of the projects have had amakudari guys in the driving seats getting 10 to 20 million yen salaries, and that needs to be cut, but they are chucking the baby out with the bathwater.

"they are chucking the baby out with the bathwater."

Judging from this case and Yamba dam, I can't see where the baby is here. The LDP had funded so many crazy unsustainable projects that I for one am happy to see the DPJ cutting back.

I agree with the comment quoted in the article that "Japan will not become second-rate just because we don't have this."

You do know that it is projected to cost more to cancel Yamba (penalty clauses for the downstream prefectures) than it would have cost to complete.

Wow. I started a web-page dedicated to this computer on my blog:
http://chottomatte.net/blog/riken-next-generation-supercomputer-kobe-port-island/
I think I must go as soon as possible to take some more pictures before they erase the whole thing (it happened before with other buildings). It seems indeed there is something wrong going on with the Japanese R&D sector lately.

"You do know that it is projected to cost more to cancel Yamba (penalty clauses for the downstream prefectures) than it would have cost to complete."

Yes, 'projected' being the key word there.

But more importantly: if you follow through with projects that plainly never should have been started in the first place on the logic that they've already gone too far, you encourage more of the same. Dig the foundation and they'll pay for the rest. This needs to stop.

I was just amazed that anyone remembered the Fifth Generation Computing project. Talk about ancient history.

Just to confirm - it seems they are really shutting down the project (two independent colleagues told me this today).

PS. I was considering even to write a project for the supercomputer (some time ago) but I gave up.

Good, one step towards preventing Skynet!