The decision to freeze spending on the project took about an hour to make and was one of a number of budget items reviewed by the Government Revitalization Unit on Friday. The panel is an initiative of the recently-elected Democratic Party of Japan-led government and is seeking to cut around ¥3 trillion in unnecessary spending to reduce the size of Japan's record ¥95 trillion national budget for next year.

For the supercomputer project the end is not quite decided. A final decision on whether to freeze spending remains to be made although the outlook appears bleak.

Ironically the decision was made the same day Kenichi Miura, a fellow at Fujitsu Labs and director of grid research at Japan's National Institute of Informatics, was awarded the IEEE's 2009 Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award. The award was given for Miura's contributions to the development of vector supercomputer hardware and software.