Can the earth simulator change the way humans think?
Tetsuya Sato · 2002
The Earth Simulator (ES) is a parallel-vector supercomputer that was developed for making precise and sound predictions of global climate and tectonic changes, and for contributing to the security and welfare of human beings. The research and development for the ES started in 1997 and was completed at the end of February, 2002. The ES consists of 640 processor nodes connected by a single-stage crossbar network, with a data transfer rate of 15 GB/s. Each node (consisting of 8 PEs) has a performance of 64 GFlops and contains 16 GB of memory. The total performance is 40 TFlops and the total memory is 10 TB.In the middle of March the ES achieved 14.5 TFlops for an atmospheric global circulation simulation, using half of the nodes of the total system (320 nodes), which is 72.5% of the theoretical peak speed. Furthermore, in the middle of April, 35.61 TFlops was achieved for LINPACK, which corresponds to about 87% of the theoretical speed. This achievement is surprising even to us, the persons involved in the project.The Earth Simulator is a powerful and useful asset for predicting the highly complex evolution of nature. It is indeed a magical tool that can directly contribute to the welfare of human beings. In addition, the emergence of this giant machine suggests a possible change in the thinking of us human beings, from reductionism to a new paradigm, or from ideal to real, or from simple to complex.The presentation will include animated demonstrations of global atmospheric circulation and ocean circulation simulations obtained by the ES.