5/17/2008

In several 3Yen reports of the past three years, poor Japan has been dropping in world supercomputer race–over the past several years the Earth Simulator supercomputer has gone from No. 1 to ninth place.
Never fear.
NEC’s new Earth Simulator system will help bring back the title to Japan for the world’s most fashionable, color coordinated supercomputer.

NEC Awarded Contract for New Earth Simulator System
hardwarezone.com : Fri 16 May 2008
… awarded the contract to build the “new Earth Simulator” ultra high-speed computing system for the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC).

The new Earth Simulator system will see an upgrade of the existing Earth Simulator, which has significantly contributed to the development of a simulation culture in the area of earth sciences and related technical fields….
…[it] is designed to deliver a system-wide peak performance of 131 TFLOPS (TFLOPS: one trillion floating point operations per second). Effective application performance is scheduled to increase two-fold on the existing Earth Simulator. The new system will be installed in the simulator building at JAMSTEC’s Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences and is expected to commence operation in March 2009. ...more...

As my drinking buddy Rob Pongi, the comedian has quipped before, “I think that you can get a clone model of one of these built for you down in Akihabara!”