"Earth Simulator" Tops the HPC Challenge Awards

NEC Corp.'s renewed "Earth Simulator," which NEC deployed in March 2009 for the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, an independent administrative organization, topped the Global FFT (Fast Fourier Transform), one of the measures of the HPC Challenge Awards with the performance number of 11.876 TFLOPS.

The award winners were announced on November 16 at the SC10 supercomputing conference held in New Orleans.

The HPC Challenge Awards are designed to evaluate four key measures that represent frequently used numerical operation patterns in scientific computing. Among them, the Global FFT is widely utilized in important scientific applications, such as climate modeling, which is critical to tackling environmental issues, and solid-earth geophysics, including seismic analysis, as well as designing of new materials.

The award-winning performance of the Earth Simulator on the Global FFT demonstrates the system’s exceptional processing capabilities on real scientific application software.

The application fields of the Earth Simulator span a wide spectrum of areas with its outstanding sustained performance. For example, it contributes to more accurate climate change projections and the comprehensive understanding of environmental issues, such as the assessment of the effects of global warming for the fifth report of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), as well as prevention and mitigation of natural disasters through high-resolution simulations of earthquakes and seismic surges. Moreover, the Earth Simulator is utilized heavily in the technical computing arena by leveraging cooperative relationships with industry partners.

NEC