Successful Achievement in Developing the Earth Simulator

Abstract

This chapter illustrates the successful achievement in developing the Earth Simulator (ES), which is an ultrahigh-speed supercomputer. The Earth Simulator project was initiated by the Science and Technology Agency of Japan (STA) (presently Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology) for aiming at understanding and elucidation of global changes as precisely as possible. It is a joint project of the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA), the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI), and the Japan Marine Science and Technology Center (JAMSTEC). The ES is a parallel computer system of the distributed-memory type and consists of 640 processor nodes connected by 640 x 640 single-stage crossbar switches. Each processor node is a shared memory system composed of eight vector processors. The total peak performance and main memory capacity are 40 Tflop/s and 10TB, respectively. The LSI technology of 0.15 μm CMOS is adopted to its one-chip vector processor. The research and development of the ES was initiated in 1997 and its development has been successfully completed in February 2002, by achieving a remarkable sustained performance of 35.86 Tflop/s in the Linpack benchmark program.