Abstract:
The goal of the Earth Simulator is to envision the form the Earth will take in the future and to execute simulations to project that form mail as accurately as possible.
The Earth Simulator, capable of executing a maximum of 40 trillion floating-point calculations in a single second, enables highly accurate predictions of changes in the Earth's environment,global climate models to evaluate the effects of global warming and problems in solid earth geophysics, It has achieved significant results in predictions of atmospheric and ocean variations, it was the fastest supercomputer in the world from 2002 to 2004. The system was developed for JAXA, JAERI, and JAMSTEC in 1997


see some features:
# Earth Simulator project started in 1997 by Japanese government
# For simulating global environment change problems
# System design proposed by NEC Corporation
# Construction completed in February 2002 and the operation started from March 2002
# Cost = about $350 million
* Highly parallel vector supercomputer
* 640 processor nodes
* Crossbar interconnection network
* 8 arithmetic processors per node (Total 640x8 = 5120)
* Distributed shared memory
* System disk 415 TB, user disk 225 TB.