The Earth Simulator reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004
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Earth Simulator

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ESC cabinets

The Earth Simulator Computer (ESC) is the fastest supercomputer in the world, located at the Earth Simulator Center in Kanazawa, Yokohama-shi, Japan. The computer is capable of 35.6 trillion (35,600,000,000,000) calculations per second. The system was developed by NASDA, JAERI, and JAMSTEC from 1997 for climate simulation. Construction started in October 1999 and was completed by February 2002, the site officially opened on March 11, 2002. The project cost 7.2 billion yen.

Built by NEC, the ESC is based on their SX-6 architecture. It consists of 640 nodes with eight vector processors and 16 gigabytes of computer memory at each node, for a total of 5120 processors and 10 terabytes of memory. Two nodes are installed per 1 metre x 1.4 metre x 2 metre cabinet, each cabinet consumes 20 KVA of power. The system has 700 terabyte of disk storage (450 for the system and 250 for the users) and 1.6 petabyte of mass storage in tape drives. The ESC is almost five times faster than IBM ASCI White and more powerful than the next five fastest machines combined (as of 2002).

It has been able to run holistic simulations of global climate in both the atmosphere and the ocean down to a precision of 10 km.

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The Earth Simulator Computer is not to be confused with the videogame SimEarth.