Earth Simulator

As Earth Simulator ( jap地球 シミュレータ, Chikyu shimyurēta, dt " Erdsimulator " ) are two Japanese supercomputer known which are based on vector processors. The first parallel computer system was in 2002 at the Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences (YES) of the NEC put into operation.

Earth Simulator ES

Then a specially conceived for him 3,250 -square-foot building was constructed ( Kanagawa Prefecture) in the district Kanazawa Yokohama City for the Earth Simulator. The original system was based on the SX -6 architecture of NEC and consisted of 640 compute nodes, which included eight vector processors and 16 GB of main memory, and 130 communication nodes, each with a crossbar switch matrix and connections to all 640 compute nodes. The communication took place over a 12.3 Gbps fast interconnection network. A total of 5120 CPUs, 10 TB of main memory, 700 TB disk and 1.6 PB tape drive memory were available.

In the TOP500 list of the Earth Simulator June 2002 to June 2004 amounted to 35.86 teraflops of computing power as the fastest computer in the world ranked first, however, he was in the list in November 2004 of two computers ( IBM's Blue Gene / L and SGI's Columbia) and was last overhauled in November 2008, only to 73rd. Since June 2011, he is no longer listed.

Earth Simulator ES2

In mid-November 2008, the first Earth Simulator was shut down and replaced by his successor with the same name officially ( ES2 ). This is based on the SX-9/E-Architektur NEC and consists of 160 compute nodes, to which eight vector processors and 128 GB of main memory are. The communication now takes place via a switch network with Fat - tree topology which can transfer 128 GB / s. Overall, the 1280 CPUs have access to 20 TB of main memory.

The new edition debuted in the TOP500 list in June 2009 with 122.4 TFLOPS at number 22, and is currently ( November 2013 ) at No. 472

Lead developer of the computer was Tadashi Watanabe.