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Virtual journey to the centre of the Earth : The World's Fastest Supercomputer System
:: 23 May, 2007
The Earth Simulator Center in Yokohama, Japan, has a new attraction along with its supercomputer: a mini-theatre that will allow scientists to interact with data in three dimensions.
The theatre extends the experience of working with complex dynamic systems. "You can place a massless virtual dust particle in the middle of a typhoon and watch what happens to it in the same way that a golf player drops grass to test the wind," says Akira Kageyama, a simulation specialist at the centre. He hopes the facility will open to all Earth Simulator users in the near future.
Visitors have been known to duck to avoid oncoming objects thrown by a virtual typhoon or even to run into the walls while viewing the inside of Earth's core.
News Inside News :
About The Earth Simulator-
NEC Corporation (NEC) announced the completion of its delivery of the ultra high-speed vector parallel computing system known as "the Earth Simulator," to the Earth Simulator Center (ESC, Tetsuya Sato, Director)". The system is slated to begin operation on March 11, 2002.
The Earth Simulator was developed by the Earth Simulator Research and Development Center (ESRDC, Kiyoshi Asai, Director), which is a collaborative organization of the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA, Shuichiro Yamanouchi, President), Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI, Kenichi Murakami, President), and Japan Marine Science and Technology Center (JAMSTEC, Takuya Hirano, President).
The Earth Simulator system was installed in the simulator building (with floor space 50m x 65m) at Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences (Yokohama, Kanagawa) of JAMSTEC. This is the world's fastest supercomputer configured with 640 nodes (64GFLOPS/node, 5,120 CPUs in total), each of which consists of eight vector processors (8GFLOPS/CPU), and achieves the peak performance of 40TFLOPS (40 trillion floating-point operations per second).
The Earth Simulator will create a "virtual planet earth" on the computer by its capability of processing vast volume of data sent from satellites, buoys and other worldwide observation point. The system will contribute to analyze and predict environmental changes on the earth through the simulation of various global scale environmental phenomena such as global warming, El Nino effect, atmospheric and marine pollution, torrential rainfall and other complicated environmental effects. It will also provide an outstanding research tool in explaining terrestrial phenomena such as tectonics and earthquakes.
NEC has been committed to the project with full-scale efforts since it was initially selected to develop the basic design in 1997. Since then, NEC has engaged in a series of developments such as the technology research and development in 1998, detailed design in 1999, the manufacture and implementation of the system in 2000, leading up to the completion of the main system and start of operation this year.
NEC is highly honored to be a part of the Earth Simulator project which Japan can proudly present to the world. By developing leading-edge technologies further, NEC intends to work on the tuning in the system's operability and the sustained performance with the maximum efforts for years to come.
Main features of the Earth Simulator's system
State-of-the-art semiconductor technology
Realizes the ultra high speed by employing the 0.15 micron (mm) copper wiring process, with approximately 60 million transistors, and leading-edge ultra-high-speed and high density CMOS technology.
Ultra large-scale parallel computation system
Built with 640 nodes (5,120 CPUs in total), each of which consists of eight vector processors (8GFLOPS/CPU, 64GFLOPS/node), achieves the peak performance of 40TFLOPS (40 trillion floating-point operations per second). 16GB main memory capacity for the shared memory of a computing node, and 10TB for the whole system.
Enhanced UNIX-based basic software and development environment
"SUPER-UX," a UNIX-based basic software developed exclusively for the NEC's supercomputer "SX-Series," is provided with large enhancement and expansion. As program development environment, language compilers which perform automatic parallelization and automatic vectorization, such as Fortran90, HPF, C, and C++ are also provided, as well as message passing library MPI2 and mathematical library ASL/ES.
About NEC Corporation
NEC Corporation (NASDAQ: NIPNY) (FTSE: 6701q.l) is a leading provider of Internet solutions, dedicated to meeting the specialized needs of its customers in the key computer, network and electron device fields through its three market-focused in-house companies: NEC Solutions, NEC Networks and NEC Electron Devices. NEC Corporation, with its in-house companies, employs approximately 150,000 people worldwide and saw net sales of 5,409 billion Yen (approx. US$43 billion) in fiscal year 2000-2001.
Tags: 3D theatre , earth center , supercomputer ,
