Everything about The Earth Simulator totally explained
The
Earth Simulator (
ES) was the fastest
supercomputer in the world from 2002 to 2004. The system was developed for
NASDA,
JAERI, and
JAMSTEC in 1997 for running
global climate models to evaluate the
effects of global warming and problems in solid earth geophysics.
It has been able to run
holistic simulations of global climate in both the
atmosphere and the
oceans down to a resolution of 10 km.
Located at the Earth Simulator Center (ESC) in
Kanazawa,
Yokohama,
Kanagawa,
Japan, the computer is capable of 35.86
trillion (35,860,000,000,000)
floating-point calculations per
second, or 35.86 TFLOPS.
Built by
NEC, the ES is based on their
SX-6 architecture. It consists of 640 nodes with eight
vector processors and 16
gibibytes of
computer memory at each node, for a total of 5120
processors and 10
tebibytes of memory. Two nodes are installed per 1
metre x 1.4 metre x 2 metre cabinet. Each cabinet consumes 20 kW of power. The system has 700
terabytes of
disk storage (450 for the system and 250 for the users) and 1.6
petabytes of
mass storage in
tape drives. The ES is almost five times faster than
ASCI White.
Construction started in October 1999, was completed by February 2002, and the site officially opened on
March 11,
2002. The project cost 7.2
billion yen.
Earth Simulator's capacity was surpassed by
IBM's
Blue Gene/L prototype on
September 29,
2004.
The ESC has several special features that help to protect the computer from natural disasters or occurrences. A wire nest hangs over the building which helps to protect from lightning. The nest itself uses high-voltage shielded cables to release lightning
current into the ground. A special light propagation system utilizes halogen lamps, installed outside of the shielded machine room walls, to prevent any magnetic interference from reaching the computers. The building is constructed on a
seismic isolation system, composed of rubber supports, that protect the building during earthquakes.
The ES OS operating system is based on
SUPER-UX.
On May 12, 2008, NEC announced that it's going to build the "new Earth Simulator", which will have a peak performance of 131 TFLOPS.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Earth Simulator'.
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