Present status of development of the Earth Simulator

The Earth Simulator is an ultra high-speed supercomputer. The research and development of the Earth Simulator was initiated in 1997 as one of the approaches in the Earth Simulator project which aims at promotion of research and development for understanding and prediction of global environmental changes. The Earth Simulator is a distributed memory parallel system which consists of 640 processor nodes connected by a single-stage full crossbar switch. Each processor node is a shared memory system composed of eight vector processors. The total peak performance and main memory capacity are 40Tflop/s and 10TB, respectively. In this paper, a concept of the Earth Simulator and an outline of the Earth Simulator system are described.