Nerd Vacation to the Earth Simulator

eecue writes "Earlier this year I went on vacation to japan. At the end of my trip I was lucky enough to receive a tour of the Earth Simulator, which is the world's fastest super computer. I took pictures and wrote about it."

Comments

Re:Hmm

[ender81b]

Well that would, of course, depend on how much bandwith is running to said server now wouldn't it? =)

Found some nice info (good old google) on said Supercomputer though since the sites linked article didn't have much.

A Time Article on The Earth Simulator

Top 500 page on Earth Simulator

NEC page on the Earth Simulator

Google Translated Powerpoint presentation on the Earth Simulator

A snippet(s) of info:
"Based on the NEC SX architecture, 640 nodes, each node with 8 vector processors (8 Gflop/s peak per processor), 2 ns cycle time, 16GB shared memory. Total of 5120 total processors, 40 TFlop/s peak, and 10 TB memory. "

"Earth Simulator's processors are one-chip LSIs fabricated with 0.15 micron CMOS process and copper wiring. Highly optimized software and high-speed networks that pump massive amounts of data through 7.8TB/s bandwidth connecting the 640 processing nodes are key to the amazing efficiency of Earth Simulator."

Re:How come we've never heard of this?

[protest_boy]

Looks like it's been #1 since at least June of last year.

http://www.top500.org/list/2002/06/

Re:so whats the interface ?

[Mister Transistor]

As far as the command set goes it's a vector processor. That means it has an instruction set that is completely unlike any standard scalar (Von Neumann) archictecture processor you may be familiar with. The CRAY series of supercomputers were one of the first vector processors around; do a google search for "CRAY Instruction Set Reference Card" and have a look. That will give you some insight on how a vector processor is programmed. Most instructions support 3 operands - 2 source and a destination argument.