Marine Ecosystems Research Department - jamstec japan agency ...

Japan Marine Science and Technology Center
Research Activities
The Earth Simulator Center
Recognized as World's Fastest Supercomputer
The New York Times bannered the incident regarding
the Earth Simulator being the world's fastest
supercomputer on the front page with the coined term
"Computenik". It compares the impact the US government
and scientific realm had received from the
achievement of calculation performance of the Earth
Simulator to that given by the Soviet Union's
"Sputnik", the world's first successful satellite.
The Earth Simulator was completed at the end of
February and the research project started from March
. As a result of executing the global standard
Linpack Benchmark Test, the Earth Simulator was
proven to be the world's fastest computer, and this lead
to the front page headline in the New York Times.
Fig. 1 The Earth Simulator
Fig. 2 Top500 Certification ranked as No.1.
Fig. 3 SC2002 Gordon Bell Award
The achieved calculation performance was five
times as fast as the previous No. supercomputer, the
ASCII White at the US Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory, with . Tflops (. trillion floatingpoint
instructions per second) which was almost the
% of the theoretical performance of Tflops.
With adequate optimization, the global scale simulation
executed by the Earth Simulator realized a sustained
performance of . Tflops, which was %
of the theoretical performance. In comparison with the
capability of parallel scalar supercomputers to realize
only a few percent of the theoretical performance, this
achievement was quite an astonishing result.
This result demonstrated that vector-parallel supercomputers
such as the Earth Simulator are very efficient
computers which can lead to a breakthrough in the
current technological field, compared with the parallel
scalar supercomputers promoted in the US, with performance
of a few percent of the theoretical performance.
With this achievement, the Earth Simulator won
the "Gordon Bell Award" for , which is the
most prestigious award given at the SC High
Performance Networking and Computing held in
November at Baltimore, Maryland in the US.
The groups connected with the Earth Simulator were
awarded in three of the five categories in the Gordon
Bell Award, such as "A . Tflops Global
Atmospheric Simulation with the Spectral Transform
Method on the Earth Simulator" for peak performance
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