Monday, April 29, 2002		On Hardware

NEC Corporation's ultra-high-speed parallel computing system "the Earth Simulator," dubbed the world's fastest computer, is seen in an undated handout photograph from the company. Jointly developed by the National Space Development Agency of Japan, Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, and Japan Marine Science and Technology Center, the Earth Simulator will create a "virtual planet earth" on the computer.

Jointly developed by the National Space Development Agency of Japan, Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, and Japan Marine Science and Technology Centre, NEC Corporation’s earth simulator is the fastest supercomputer of the world. It consists of 640 computing knots with altogether 5120 processors and reaches in the ideal case a speed of 40 Teraflops (40 trillion floating decimal point operations per second). Each knot (64 giga floating-point operations per second) contains eight vector processors (0,15-Mikron, copper and CMOS technology), which are to possess an arithmetic performance of 8 giga floating-point operations per second each. 16 gigabyte together used main storage and with it 10 Terabyte is to each computing knot for the entire system at the disposal.

The special UNIX based "super UX" operating system was developed and extended by NEC. The earth simulator is to serve and help the study of the environment to solve global environmental problems and/or to develop measures against natural catastrophes.

The earth simulator uses the data taken through the satellites, buoys and similar earth observation stations and will assist in the understanding the phenomena as ground electrode warming, air & marine pollution and El-Niño-effect.

Planning for the earth simulator began in 1997. Two years later, it started with the detail construction, while production and implementation began in 2000. The completion of the main system and the operating admission lasted up to this year.

The Japanese Earth Simulator is producing results. With over 35 Tflop/s, it five times outperforms the ASCI White supercomputer that is leading the current TOP500 list. No doubt that position is for the Earth Simulator, not only for the next list but probably even for the coming two years. In the New York Times, benchmark compiler Jack Dongarra compares the event with the Sputnik, hence he dubbed the Earth Simulator "Computenik".

The Earth Simulator is a special purpose machine, made by NEC with the same type of vector technology as is available on the SX-6. This is a different approach than the Americans are taking, who base the large machines on off-the shelf technology. A clear advantage of the Japanese approach is that they "only" need 5104 processors for the Earth Simulator. The ASCI White at the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and made by IBM, already needs 8192 processors for 7 Tflop/s.

Nevertheless, a complete new building was created for the Earth Simulator, because it is a huge machine. Hans Meuer, the father of the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, asked for a comment, says: The ES (Earth Simulator) is a significant step into the future of high end supercomputers: it is approximately 5 times faster than the current #1, ASCI White, if we take the best linpack performance as a yardstick.

The New York Times reports: "In some sense we have a Computenik on our hands," said Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who reported the achievement last week.