JAMSTEC Upgrades Earth Simulator System

The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) has upgraded the Earth Simulator System to a new NEC's SX-9/E supercomputer in March 2009. The Simulator is designed to perform accurate, high-speed analysis and projections of global-scale environmental changes, and is expected to contribute to cutting-edge research fields by enabling computations that are difficult to perform on other computer systems.

Developed as a national project, the original Earth Simulator System was installed at JAMSTEC's Yokohama research center in February 2002 and had made significant contributions to advancement of earth science as well as computational science and technology. After seven years of operation, the aging parts prompted JAMSTEC to replace the system.

The new Earth Simulator, is a parallel computer system with 160 processor nodes (the original simulator had 640 processor nodes) interconnected through a Fat-tree network. It has total of 1280 CPUs with a peak performance of 131 TERAFLOPS (the peak performance of the original simulator was 40 TERAFLOPS), enabling 131 trillion floating point calculations per second.

Supercomputer Predicts More Heat Waves, Heavy Rainfall in Japan up to 2100 (Related JFS article)
http://www.japanfs.org/en/pages/025776.html
Earth Simulator
http://www.jamstec.go.jp/es/en/index.html
"Earth Simulator System" Achieves World's Top Computing Efficiency on the LINPACK Benchmark
http://www.nec.co.jp/press/en/0906/0401.html

Posted: 2009/07/22 06:00:15 AM