Yoshinori Sakamoto

Development and achievement of NAL Numerical Wind Tunnel (NWT) for CFD computations

NAL Numerical Wind Tunnel (NWT) is a distributed memory parallel computer developed through joint research and development of NAL and Fujitsu. It is based on the analysis of CFD codes developed in NAL. The target performance is more than 100 times faster than VP400. In this paper, the parallel computation model employed in the development of the NWT is described. The specification and feature of the NWT and the NWT Fortran are discussed. Finally, performance evaluations and some applications are presented. We find that the target performance is attained.<<ETX>>

Overview of the Fujitsu VPP500 supercomputer

The authors present an overview of the Fujitsu VPP500 vector parallel processor. The VPP500 is a high-performance, highly parallel distributed memory system. A crossbar network interconnects 4 to 222 processing elements, which gives a maximum system performance of up to 355 GFLOPS and an aggregate memory capacity of at most 55 Gbyte. The UNIX SVR4-based operating system, modified for the VPP500s distributed memory environment, supports the FORTRAN77 compiler to present the programmer with a high-performance, shared memory paradigm.<<ETX>>

The software on the VPP500 system

The VPP500 system is a commercial, distributed memory, parallel computer system based on vector parallel architecture. The software of the VPP500 system is described here. The OS is UNIX-based, enhanced with distributed parallel features. A system that is easy to use and has high performance requires a (1) realized one-system image ; (2) pursued ultrahigh performance ; and (3) enhanced operation of the system. To satisfy two fundamental requirements of a language processor system, (1) effective use of the existing program assets and (2) extraction of potential performance of hardware system, we have implemented VPP Fortran (the standard FORTRAN77 enhanced with the features of parallel processing). The various data on VPP Fortran show that the VPP500 system, which consists of hardware, OS and language processor system, has both high performance and high efficiency.