Earth Simulator

The Earth Simulator is the ninth most powerful Ordinateur of the world in June 2006. Brought into service at the end of 2001, it was n°1 until in June 2004, then third in November 2004 and fourth in August 2005. Built by NEC with Yokohama, Japan, it is mainly used in the fields of weather simulation and seismological.

It reaches a power of 40 TeraFLOPS whereas the current Pentium 4 given rhythm to 3 GHz develop only one power from approximately 3 GigaFLOPS, therefore the Earth Simulator is approximately 12.000 times more powerful than good number of current personal computers.

The Earth Simulator was a bends in the field of super calculation, since this machine remained 1st with signal 500 during practically 3 years. It was also a revolutionary machine from several points of view: whereas the tendency of the time was with the machines massively parallel, the Earth Simulator gave to the last style vectorial architectures and showed how the " mélange" of architecture (SMP+MPP, scalar + vectorial) could lead to the realization of extremely powerful machines. The Earth Simulator also made it possible to manufacturer NEC to be essential as world leader of the vector calculus until 2007.

See too

External bonds

The Earth Simulator Center
top500.org in June 2002
top500.org

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