Earth Simulator | 2002 ~ 2009

Earth Simulator


 The first generation of Earth Simulator was a highly parallel vector supercomputer system developed as part of the Japanese government's "Earth Simulator Project." It was used to run global climate models to evaluate the effects of global warming and address problems in solid Earth geophysics. Developed for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, and the Japan Marine Science and Technology Center (JAMSTEC), the project began in 1997, construction started in October 1999, and it officially opened on March 11, 2002. The project cost 60 billion yen.

Built by NEC, the system was based on their SX-6 architecture, consisting of 640 nodes with eight vector processors and 16 GB of memory per node, totaling 5120 processors and 10 TB of memory. Two nodes were installed in each 1-meter × 1.4-meter × 2-meter cabinet, and each cabinet consumed 20 kW of power. The system had 700 TB of disk storage (450 TB for the system and 250 TB for users) and 1.6 PB of mass storage in tape drives. It could run holistic global climate simulations for both the atmosphere and the oceans at a resolution of 10 km. Its performance on the LINPACK benchmark was 35.86 TFLOPS, nearly five times faster than the previous fastest supercomputer, ASCI White.

The Earth Simulator was the fastest supercomputer in the world from 2002 to 2004, and its performance was surpassed by IBM's Blue Gene/L prototype on September 29, 2004.

이 블로그의 인기 게시물

콜러서스 컴퓨터 [Colossus computer | December 1943]

NTDS [Naval Tactical Data System | 1961]

에니악 [ENIAC | December 10, 1945]