Shinichi Habata

A 26.58 Tflops Global Atmospheric Simulation with the Spectral Transform Method on the Earth Simulator

A spectral atmospheric general circulation model called AFES (AGCM for Earth Simulator) was developed and optimized for the architecture of the Earth Simulator (ES). The ES is a massively parallel vector supercomputer that consists of 640 processor nodes interconnected by a single stage crossbar network with its total peak performance of 40.96 Tflops was achieved for a high resolution simulation (T1279L96) with AFES by utilizing the full 640-node configuration of the ES. The resulting computing efficiency is 64.9% of the peak performance, well surpassing that of conventional weather/climate applications having just 25-50% efficiency even on vector parallel computers. This remarkable performance proves the effectiveness of the ES as a viable means for practical applications.

Basic Design of the Earth Simulator

The Earth Simulator is an ultra high-speed supercomputer. The research and development of the Earth Simulator started in 1997 as one of the approaches in the Earth Simulator project which aims at the promotion of research and development for understanding and prediction for global environment change. Conceptual design and basic design of the Earth Simulator have been finished so far. According to the design, the Earth Simulator is a distributed memory parallel system which consists of 640 processor nodes connected by an internode 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, the concepts of the Earth Simulator system and the outline of the basic design are presented.